Last (belated) stop on the Halloween Carnival review circuit…
Volume 5 opens with a story from the owner of Cemetery Dance Publications himself, Richard Chizmar. “Devil’s Night” (first published in 1996, and previously reprinted in 2012 as a Halloween Short Story ebook) is a fine piece of night-before-Halloween noir: a tale of infidelity and murder, told by an everyman narrator (a high school English teacher) who finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like the best dark-crime fiction, “Devil’s Night” (which tellingly surnames one of its characters “Cain“) shines because of the voice recounting the vice and violence.
Lisa Tuttle’s “The Last Dare” is slow to unfold, but ultimately proves an unsettling piece of quiet horror (concerning a seemingly witch-haunted “tower house”). The employment of a grandmother protagonist here makes for a fresh variation on the traditional Halloween tale.
In “The Halloween Bleed (A Dr. Sibley Curiosity),” Norman Prentiss offers an interesting premise: that Halloween’s darkly magical influence can carry over to other days. While engaging in its depiction of sorcerous intrigue, the story simultaneously distances the reader because it feels like a snippet from a larger narrative tapestry (admission: I have not read any of Prentiss’s other tales of the sinister academic Bennet Sibley).
To my surprise, Kevin Quigley’ “Swing” deals not with some haunted piece of playground equipment but with swing music. Credit might have been due for taking an unusual angle onto the holiday theme, except that Halloween is only touched upon obliquely here. Featuring an uncertain narrator who poses questions to the very end, this one is a bit of a tedious read.
Closing out the volume and the series is another tale mixing music (in this case, jazz) and Halloween mayhem: Peter Straub’s 1994 novella “Pork Pie Hat” (first published in Murder for Halloween, and also included in Cemetery Dance’s classic anthology October Dreams). Straub, though, produces much more elegant prose than Quigley, and his tale grips the reader with its nested narratives, its atmospheric trek into the backwoods of the racially-tense Deep South (shades of Harper Lee), and its element of mystery that is maintained right up until the final paragraphs. “Pork Pie Hat” is an immaculately crafted tale, filled with haunting images and striking lines, such as the following proclamation by the eponymous musician: “Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things–I’m telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe.”
With three middling stories sandwiched between two stellar (yet familiar) reprints, Halloween Carnival Volume 5 is a must-have only for the series completist.