A grieving couple tries to hide away from Halloween following the death of their only son on the holiday, but a familiar trick-or-treater keeps knocking on their door throughout the night.
On the Night of the Strigoi, a woman gives her granddaughter a leaf that will make her dream of the man she’s fated to marry, and unwittingly unleashes horrors upon their house.
In Ireland, during the Great Famine, an English captain sends a series of letters to his daughter, writing of an encounter with a strange, ethereal young woman who seems to hold him in her thrall.
In a small town in the nineties, a new girl struggles to make friends. After spending an awkward Halloween night with some kids from her school, she is humiliated in a public and horrible manner… and transforms into something terrible.
On Halloween, a group of young men set out to cause mischief and mayhem. The youngest, desperate to fit in, suggests defiling the grave of the local witch, and the night takes a sinister turn.
Bringing together leading voices in contemporary horror literature, legendary editor Ellen Datlow delivers a collection of stories about the myriad ways we observe, celebrate, or desecrate those nights devoted to the dead, when the veil between worlds grows thin and the mythic and the mundane can walk side by side in the dark.
Taken as a whole, All Hallows’ Eve is a remarkably coherent collection. There are a few missteps, of course, as is the case with most anthologies. These were mostly the work of authors who, as the kids tend to say, didn’t seem to understand the assignment, turning in perfectly respectable and perfectly run-of-the-mill stories that, yes, may have been eerie and unnerving and even, at times, full of terror, but had only, in the end, the thinnest connection to Halloween or Día de Muertos or any other day of spiritual and cultural observance. The entire point of the thing, in other words.
Thankfully, much of this volume is a veritable feast of fine, folkloric fiction, so there’s still plenty to celebrate. Standout stories: “Treats” by Clay McLeod Chapman (a beautifully written, haunting gut-punch of a tale); “Or So the Story Goes” by Christopher Golden (mythic and Gothic and baroque—an abundance of atmosphere); “The Hungry Grass” by Siobhan Carroll (historical, mystical, vampirical—my personal favorite); “Give Me Something Good to Eat” by Theresa DeLucci (an impeccable and visceral portrait of nineties melancholia); “Dare Me” by Richard Kadrey (a wicked, intense tale of boyhood bravado).
My constant companion all through this lonesome October. There are worse ways to spend the month.
