Happy Halloween, freaks! It’s been quite a while since I featured a book with a pumpkin on the cover. So here’s something by Al Sarrantonio.
I went through a Sarrantonio phase a few years ago. I enjoyed all of the books I read by him, but most of the ones I haven’t read seem to have Halloweeny titles. This gives me limited window during the year to check them out. I gave his short story collection Halloween and Other Seasons a go this October. Here’s what I remember from the stories:
| Summer | Summer gets hotter and hotter until everyone dies. The fact that this is literally happening made this story less enjoyable than it probably was when it was written. |
| Sleepover | Kids abandoned by their parents into a realm of blackness. |
| Eels | Unpleasant dad takes kid out to sea to drown him, but kid is an eel. |
| Letters from camp | Summer camp run by bad robots. |
| Roger in the Womb | Baby refuses to be born. Uses morse code to contact outside |
| The Return of Mad Santa | exactly what you’d think. |
| Baby Boss and the Underground Hamasters | Bizarre screenplay about talking hamsters and a chicken. I let my children listen to this. They loved it. |
| Trail of the Chromium Bandits | Western that turns into sci-fi. |
| The Man in the Other Car | Excellent story about man getting mad driving his family to park. This was the absolute highlight of this collection. Grim ending. |
| Hedges | Awful teacher becomes part of a bush. Weird. Not in a good way. |
| The Silly Stuff | Reporter meets Charles Fort who is an alien |
| The New Kid | A new kid shows up and stops the bullies bullying the old new kid. Then old new kid turns into new new kid. A story so predictable and not interesting that it made me want to quit this book. |
| Ahead of the Joneses | Jealous neighbours outdo each other. Silly. |
| The Artist in the small room above. | Weird sci-fi. An emotional muse inspires music so emotional it kills. |
| The Dancing Foot | Guy pushes girl in front of train. Her foot comes back for revenge. |
| Liberty | Another western. A nasty guy takes advantage of pioneer Americans. |
| Dust | A family enters a dust cloud while driving through some mountains. It becomes considerably more difficult to deal with than they imagined. |
| The Pumpkin Boy | This is the longest story by far, and it’s actually part of Sarrantonio’s Orangefield cycle. I haven’t read those books yet, and while I got the feeling it was referencing those stories now and again, this story does work by itself. A weird pumpkin robot boy shows up and some kids go missing. |
I quite enjoyed this collection. I don’t think it was quite as consistent as Toybox (the only other collection of Sarrantonio’s short fiction that I’ve read). Halloween was published over a decade after Toybox, but some of the stories are considerably older than the ones in that earlier collection. A few of these older stories clearly weren’t good enough for Toybox. That said, I was still decently entertained throughout. I might try to read the rest of the Orangefield books next year.
Have a spooky one!
Nocturnal Revelries 