Happy Halloween! Short stories from Al Sarrantonio

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!

More from Al Sarrantonio – Moonbane, Toybox and Skeletons

A few months ago I read a book called The Worms by Al Sarrantonio on a whim. I really liked it, so I decided to read more of his stuff.

Moonbane
Spectra – 1989

A bunch of evil werewolves from the moon land on Earth and start attacking humanuty, eating most but turning plenty of us into werewolves too. After witnessing the transformation of his son and death of his wife, a sensitive poet finds himself tagging along with a crew of scientists on their way to a military base to perform some kind of drastic rescue mission, the nature of which the scientists are hesitant to discuss. All I’ll say is that it involves a really big rocket and some REALLY big bombs.

Honestly, if you don’t want to read this after hearing that and seeing this book’s cover, you’re a lost cause. Rockets and moon-wolves. Cool!

Toybox
Leisure Books – 2003 (Originally published 1999)

I had heard that Sarrantonio was a better short story writer than a novel writer, so I decided to check out his first story collection, Toybox. The person who told me that Sarrantonio’s stories were worth reading also mentioned a great likeness to the work of Ray Bradbury. Aside from Fahrenheit 451 and a couple of short stories, I hadn’t actually read anything by Bradbury when I started this. It often takes me a while to get through short story collections. I read one or two stories from different collections when I’m between novels. While I was dipping in and out of Toybox, one of the novels I read was Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. This clarified for me what my friend had meant with his comparison. I soon thereafter read a couple of collections of Bradbury’s creepier stories, and this further confirmed my impressions. Sarrantonio’s short stories are very, very Bradburyian. Nearly all of them involve children, Halloween and carnivals. Some of the stories in this collection use almost identical premises to Bradbury tales. ‘Father Dear’, one of the stories in here is about a kid whose dad keeps him inside his house and lies to him about everything. There’s a Bradbury story called ‘Jack in the Box’ about a kid whose mom does almost the exact same thing. Whatever though, it’s hardly a bad thing to be compared to Ray Bradbury. (I’ve been loving the Ray recently.) I enjoyed Toybox plenty. ‘Pumpkin Head’ and ‘The Corn Dolly’ were probably my favourites in here, but it’s all pretty good.

Skeletons
Bantam – 1992

This is an epic post apocalyptic novel in which the last remaining good guys on Earth are drawn together by dreams/psychic visions. (I mean epic in the literal sense here too.) It’s basically the same thing as Stephen King’s The Stand except the disease and bad guys in this book are the same thing. They’re skeletons. The skeletons of every human (and animal) that ever lived have risen from their graves and they are really angry with humanity.

There’s 4 narratives running throughout the book. The bulk of the story centers on a Cambodian politician stuck in Russia and an American girl who is unable to speak making their ways across their respective continents to meet eachother. The rest of the tale is told from the perspective of the risen Abraham Lincoln and Roger Garbage, a music industry cokehead who the skeletons keep alive for the purposes of arranging the biggest rock festival ever.

The novel is absurd, and there’s many little inconsistences and plot holes throughout the story, but there’s a scene in this book where the Beatles (in skeleton form) get back together to perform, so I found it pretty easy to ignore the problems and just go with it. I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be read for fun, so there’s no need to dissect it like a college professor. Although it’s about skeletons, the length and scope of the work make it more a fantasy than a horror novel, and while I enjoyed it well enough, it was probably my least favourite of the books I’ve read by Sarrantonio. (It’s not bad. I just really like short books at the moment.)

I can’t say that I was truly blown away by any of the books I’ve read by Al Sarrantonio, but I was entertained by all of them. They’re imaginative, fun and well written. I’ve read 4 of his books in the last 4 months, so I’ll give him a break for a while, but I look forward to reading more of his books in the future.

The Worms – Al Sarrantonio

the worms sarrantonio The Worms – Al Sarrantonio

Berkley Books – 1988 (first published 1985)

You know what this blog needs? Yeah, that’s it! More horror novels about evil worms.

I didn’t know anything about this book when I started it apart from the fact that the author had written a series of books about Halloween. Most of the horror novels I’ve read about Halloween suck ass, so I didn’t have high hopes for a worm horror book written by a Halloween guy. I was quite surprised by The Worms though.

This is the story of toxic waste infused worm zombies taking over a small town. Anyone who gets bitten by these freaks turns into a worm themselves, and that’s only the beginning of their transformation. This book has loads of action and grossout moments, and I loved every page. By the end, the small town where the story is set has turned into a Boschean hellscape. This is entertaining stuff.

This might not be high literature, but it was a lot of fun. I wish I knew about books like this when I was a teenager. If you have older kids, encourage them to read this! As an adult, I fully intend on reading more Sarrantonio on the future; maybe I’ll even do his Halloween series this October.

This is a short review, but there’s not much left to be said. Sarrantonio’s The Worms is a slick little horror novel that makes good on its title’s promises. If you like fun horror novels, you should read this book.

I recently reviewed another book with a similar title. For the record, I personally enjoyed The Worms more than Worms.