The year 2020 marks the twentieth anniversary of the amazing Cemetery Dance anthology October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween. This subtitle says it all, as the book forms a treasure trove of holiday-themed writing, clocking in at a whopping 650 pages. Editors Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish strike a fine balance between original offerings and classic reprints (the volume features twenty-one fictional tales, plus one poem). Like the assorted sweets heaped inside a trick-or-treater’s candy bag, the table of contents brims with brand-name greats and the less well-known (but no less enjoyable).

October Dreams gives rise to tales covering the various aspects popularly associated with the holiday. There are tales of pumpkin carving: the graphic grotesquerie of Dean Koontz’s “The Black Pumpkin,” the more restrained yet extremely disturbing art of Charles L. Grant’s “Eyes.” Trick-or-treating stories galore, involving gruesome comeuppance in F. Paul Wilson’s visceral “Buckets,” and terrible revelation in Jack Ketchum’s gut-punching “Gone.” Old, dark houses loom throughout, from the shadowed abode in Richard Laymon’s shocker “Boo” to the utterly haunting structure in Tim Lebbon’s “Pay the Ghost.” Witches get their kicks from ill-treated children, whimsically in Gahan Wilson’s “Yesterday’s Witch,” and much more wickedly in creep-meister Ramsey Campbell’s “The Trick.” Self-reflexive tales take the telling of spook stories as their very subject, in Lewis Shiner’s ouroboros of an October narrative, “The Circle,” and Peter Straub’s foray into Faulknerian Southern Gothic in the novella “Pork Pie Hat.” The selections run the gamut from quiet realism (Ray Bradbury’s subtle yet unsettling “Heavy Set”) to fantastic flights of Lovecraftian terror (or descents, in the case of Caitlin R. Kiernan’s sublimely-titled “A Redress for Andromeda”).

The fictional narratives are greatly variegated in October Dreams, but the book adds even more into the mix with its inclusion of nonfiction pieces. Paula Guran’s “A Short History of Halloween” teems with information, offering plenty of savory tidbits in its baker’s-dozen-worth of pages. In “First of All, It Was October,” Gary A. Braunbeck engages in a broad survey of Halloween -themed/-related movies. Towards the volume’s end, Stefan Dziemianowicz’s “Trick-or-Read: A Reader’s Guide to Halloween Fiction” assures that there are further narrative neighborhoods to venture through.

But without a doubt, the most unexpected treat in October Dreams is the “My Favorite Halloween Memory” feature. These slices of personal memoir prove just as engaging and atmospheric as the fictional tales bracketing them. They remind the reader why Halloween is so beloved, and provide insight on how the narrators developed into writers–whether out of nostalgic hope of recapturing the delightful frights of childhood, or in the determination to surpass them.

Somewhat surprisingly, Ray Bradbury–the “October Dreamer Extraordinaire” to whom the anthology is dedicated–shares a sad rather than favorite Halloween memory (recounting his loss of holiday spirit following the death of his friend Federico Fellini on October 31st). At the start of the piece, Bradbury writes, “I often wonder why people wander around shouting to one another, ‘Happy Halloween!’ It is not supposed to be happy. We celebrate it with a certain amount of fervor and excitement, but at its core it is about those who have gone on ahead of us.” Looking back through the anthology today, I am sadly reminded of just how many of the writers (Bradbury included) gathered within the book have passed away in the twenty years since its publication. From the vantage point of 2020, October Dreams constitutes not just a celebration of Halloween; it forms a memorial to genre giants laid low. It also reinforces the function and import of Halloween horror: as the season turns dark and cold, we briefly make friends with death, that relentless predator who otherwise stalks us every moment of our lives.

After a gap of too many years, Cemetery Dance finally released a wonderful follow-up volume, October Dreams II. Two decades later, though, the first anthology remains the benchmark of Halloween writing, a book that has aged with tremendous grace. October dreams might typically turn nightmarish, but this collection affirms that they can be happily revisited.

Al Sarrantonio is a revered scribe of Halloween-themed fiction, the author of assorted classic stories such as “Pumpkin Head” and “The Corn Dolly” (both collected in Toybox), as well as the tales and novels comprising the Orangefield Cycle. His 1990 novel October doesn’t seem to be as widely known, but it is no less rewarding a read.

Tellingly, Sarrantonio dedicates October to Charles L. Grant, the leading writer of quiet–style horror in the late 20th Century. Sarrantonio knows his precursors, and to no surprise also ventures into Bradbury Country here: the novel features a sinister encounter at a seedy midwestern carnival. The influence of Stephen King’s It (which is itself indebted to Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes) can also be detected, not just in the figure of a deadly, dreadful clown, but also in the focus on the generational recurrence of evil in a small East Coast town.

October opens somewhat slowly; there’s not a lot of action in the early pages, outside of a flashback scene of a Halloween party that takes a tragic turn for a group of high schoolers. Such pacing is surely deliberate, designed to make the eruption of violence mid-book that much more shocking. The narrative defies expectations, offering surprise yet satisfying twists. As if the notion of Abe Lincoln’s likeness on a killing spree isn’t striking enough, the novel contains moments of Cronenberg-worthy body horror guaranteed to test the reader’s gag reflex: “The thing in his mouth scrambled held his tongue in its pincers, pulled itself back toward the back of his throat–”

Similar to his Orangefield Cycle, Sarrantonio’s novel engages in a personification of festival ritual. “Saman, the Celtic Lord of Death” is rooted in mythic misinterpretation (not to mention mispronunciation)–the Celts did not actually worship some dark deity when celebrating Samhain (sow-en, meaning “End of Summer”). At least in October, Sarrantonio provides an intriguing terrestrial explanation: the figure is an ancient, chthonian, body-snatching creature hellbent on spreading carnage and chaos (especially on October 31st, a day sacred to the monstrosity after the cringing Celts–in the author’s fictional reworking of history–elevated it to godhood). The so-called Lord of Death is given a fantastic yet plausible backstory in October, and the uncanny creature hailed as such makes for a harrowing adversary here. Scenes late in the novel presented in Saman’s own, puppet-mastering viewpoint are the stuff of pure horror.

This proves to be a finely-plotted novel, with the disparate characters introduced in the early chapters later crossing paths in frightful ways. Tension mounts as the chapters, and their datelining titles, move ominously toward month’s end (the book builds to a bloody and fiery climax on Halloween night). October is also noteworthy for its well-established setting–the Hudson Valley community of New Polk, “the province of apple orchards and roadside stands.” Sarrantonio creates an even stronger sense of time, of seasonal transition: “Autumn was the bittersweet season, the beautiful, tender passing of the year from life toward death, from knowability to unknowability.” The darkening events of the narrative reflect natural earthly cycle, where bounty yields to barrenness:

Here, in the nightshade of these bare branches, autumn had already passed to winter. Dead apples. The ground was carpeted in unharvested fruit, saturated with the sharp, sick smell of rot. Insects moved into fruit corpses,, drilled holes into paling red skins. Pulp turned from crisp white to soft mealiness. Brown, the color of decay.

Within the the world of the novel, a central character (Eileen Connel) is the author of a book, Season of Witches, that has yet to get the recognition it richly deserves. The same no doubt holds true for October itself, Sarrantonio’s neglected masterpiece of autumnal terror.