'It’s Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unravelling. Up and down the street, horrifying secrets are being revealed, and all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified, and beg the neighbourhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man. There’s a small clearing in the woods now that was never there before, and a blackthorn tree that doesn’t belong at all. These odd children claim that The Cunning Man is coming for them...and they want the local kids to protect them. But with families falling apart and the neighbourhood splintered by bitterness, who will save the children of Parmenter Road?'
Everyone loves the 1980's right now, with more and more stories cashing in on nostalgia for the decade. For those who love the 80's and get a kick out of Halloween All Hallows might be the book for you, as it combines the horrors of living in 80's suburbia with the fun of Halloween in a book that's more neighbourhood soap opera than actual horror.
All Hallows follows a number of residents of Parmenter Road, a quiet street in the town of Coventry, Massachusetts. There's Tony Barbosa, who puts on a special haunted woods attraction behind his house each and every year, complete with special effects and actors to jump out and scare people; though this year is his final year as he's having to sell his house and move away following a layoff from work. There's the Sweeney family, overworked and put-upon wife Barb, her heavy drinking womanising husband Donnie, and their three kids caught in the middle of their marriage difficulties; whose relationship comes to a crashing and violent end on Halloween night. And there's Vanessa Montez, the punky daughter of two immigrants trying to fit into a neighbourhood of mostly white people all whilst trying to hide the fact that she's a lesbian; who will lose her best friend and be publicly humiliated before the night is over.
These are just a few of the characters that we follow over the course of the book, though they're not the only ones by a long shot. Each member of their families feature in the narratives that intertwine with each other and cross over as we see the events of this one small neighbourhood over a single night. The reason I opened with describing this as being akin to a soap opera is that that's how a lot of this plays out. There's infidelity, domestic abuse, crying children, betrayals of trust, young love, coming of age stories, marriage breakdowns, drunken parties, public fist fights, and even a pair of neighbourhood paedophiles to deal with too. With all of that going on how does the horror even find time to fit in?
Over the course of the evening, as people air their dirty laundry left right and centre and put entire seasons worth or TV story arcs on display for all, several creepy children begin to appear on Parmenter Road. These children, dressed in odd costumes, talk about The Cunning Man, some form of evil entity that's coming for them. They beg the people that they find to let them hide just until midnight, telling them that if they can just avoid The Cunning Man until midnight they'll be safe. Sadly, these moments are far too few and far between to end up being anything but a small side-story in what's supposed to be a horror book.
Most of these children barely make an appearance until more than half way into the book, and those that do have fleeting moments on the page. The Crooked Man too makes an occasional appearance early on, but when he gets four or five pages sandwiched between fifty about the various trials and tribulations of the people on the street you almost forget that he's even a thing. By the time the book turns into a more overt horror story you've got perhaps twenty percent of the book left to go, and stopped caring at around the halfway point.
All Hallows made one of the greatest sins of a horror story, it left be absolutely bored. If this was marketed as a neighbourhood drama, which is what most of the book felt like, I'd have perhaps been open to watching several marriages fall to pieces; but I'd come for a spooky Halloween tale. I like getting to know characters in horror stories, but this was that dialled up to the extreme, where it was all character focus and very little actual horror. The fact that most of the characters were thoroughly unlikable also didn't help matters. If the horror of the book was in capturing how awful the 80's were to live in, and in how disgusting people can be then the book succeeded, but if it was the ghosts and monsters that make a cameo appearance then it certainly fell too far off the mark for me.
Christopher Golden has made some great horror stories, and I grew up reading his Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels, so I know that he can scare me, but this book just didn't. It was hard to get to the end of All Hallows, I got very little from it, and I'm sad to say that this time it wasn't a book for which I was the audience.
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