Catching up with my reviews of Cemetery Dance’s seasonal anthology series, Halloween Carnival…
In the fourth volume’s opener, “The Mannequin Challenge” by Kealan Patrick Burke, a curmudgeonly coworker reluctantly attends an office Halloween party, only to discover the expected revelers all frozen in lifeless pose. The squirming reader, though, will be anything but unmoved after witnessing what unfolds from this scene of strange stasis.
Unsurprisingly, considering that Ray Garton is the author, “Across the Tracks” offers the most adult content in the ebook. A trio of trick-or-treaters encounter not only foul-mouthed and sexually-perverse bullies, but also a bizarre scene of naked paganism. Garton’s transgressive story also appropriately defies neat moral wrap-up, ending instead with a nasty twist.
Bev Vincent channels Bradbury in “The Halloween Tree,” but the oaken totem of the title proves much darker than the pumpkin-lit specimen famously spied by Pipkin’s friends. I have always been a fan of dead/creepy-looking trees in nature and literature, and the one featured here is positively rotten to the core.
In “Pumpkin Eater,” C.A. Suleiman serves up a slice of E.C. Comics-style comeuppance. While fairly predictable in its plotting, the tale is enriched by its sardonic tone and the unfriendly banter of a husband and wife on the verge of a deadly parting. Good, mean fun.
The volume’s lone reprint, Paul Melniczek’s novella “When the Leaves Fall,” opens in Bradburyesque fashion: a pair of young, mildly-mischievous Halloween lovers have their innocence tested by an encounter with something wicked in their small town. There’s a strong American Gothic vibe to the piece, with its sinister farm setting and townspeople characters plagued by a terrible secret. The problem is, the dark forces at work are kept in the shadows for far too long; suspense is counteracted as the plot drags on and the first-person narration grows overwrought (frequently lapsing into the melodramatic rhetoric of some Lovecraftian stumbler upon unnameable horrors).
Comprising half the book’s length, the underwhelming concluding novella feels like filler. This editorial misstep unfortunately renders the fourth leg of Halloween Carnival‘s October-long journey rather pedestrian.