Eleven Stories from The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories (2018) edited by Stephen Jones
Readers unfamiliar with The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories may prefer to read these notes only after reading the anthology.
"Omens weren’t always beautiful things."
"The Halloween Monster by Alison Littlewood"
Are monsters born, or are they made? Does the lesser monster recognize the greater?
Littlewood's kitchen-sink realism imbues this teen-coming-of-age-on-Halloween story -- trite as that theme has become -- with a shocking reversal of reader expectation at the end.
"Memories of Día de los Muertos" (1993) by Nancy Kilpatrick
The Mexican Catholic tradition is nicely summarized in this story of hunger and humility. Kilpatrick tells the story in second-person present-tense, and she could not have made a bolder or more successful choice.
"Bone Fire" by Storm Constantine
Another Halloween night teenager coming-of-age story. For a change, the time the teens are women friends, and the world in which the story takes place is far removed from ours.
At the first crossroads, we placed our offerings at the stone cross—me the apple, Jenna the meat—and Jenna chanted:
“Hekkate, Hekkate, bring me tonight
sweet love in the light of the bone-fire,
when your dogs hold their tongues
and only the moon may howl.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. Even I knew Hekkate was not a goddess interested in love, since she was the four faces of the moon, from light to dark, and was friendly with Death. “Maybe she’ll give you a corpse to love,” I said.
“Don’t be stupid, Emlie,” Jenna snapped. “I want one of her sons, for she lends them sometimes and puts them in the body of a boy. Tonight, I want something better than a sweaty, snotty barn-boy.”
“Idiot,” I said, and we linked arms and walked away.
"Bone Fires" is a poignant and very satisfying story, demonstrating how high Halloween fiction can reach.
The October Widow (2014) by Angela Slatter
Mirabel Morgan brings renewed fertility to every town where she resides. Her role is not an individual choice.
[….] if only people appreciated that something had to be given back in order for the wheel to spin, for the earth to bloom anew. A child lost here, a pet taken there; the tiny sacrifices that kept the world going until the larger giving might happen.
Aging, Mirabel is renewed every 31 October when she sacrifices her latest young male consort on a bed of fire. But how many young men can be sacrificed before someone catches on?
Before the Parade Passes by Marie O'Regan
“All right!” Sarah gathered herself up, frowning, and whispered, “Halloween’s different here. It’s because of the house.”
Hannah flinched and turned involuntarily to stare in the direction she knew the “haunted house” to be. “The house?”
“They say it’s haunted, and it is, but it’s only the ghosts of the children it’s taken. They don’t mean any harm.”
Hannah was horrified. “Children?”
“They go missing every year,” Sarah whispered, as if afraid she was going to be overheard and reported. “It’s the Halloween Parade.”
“The Parade?” Part of Hannah was aware she was simply parroting what Sarah was saying, and that she sounded like an idiot, but she was lost for words. What did you say to something so crazy? Did you humor the speaker, go for help, what?
Sarah sighed. “I know you think I’m mad. Perhaps I am mad, I don’t know anymore. But it’s true. The kids do the Parade every year, and one always goes missing.”
"Before The Parade Passes By" is a tour de force. Hannah and her daughter Tillie are alone in the world, and new in their small town. Tillie brings home a black robe and a jack-o-lantern carved from a turnip: her class has begun rehearsing for the annual Halloween parade.
Uncanny events multiply over the next week, and O'Regan organizes her effects with superb skill.
The Ultimate Halloween Party App by Lisa Morton
"The Ultimate Halloween Party App" is set in a near-future where every shade of petty bourgeois identity/environmental/tech politics has its own armed-struggle wing. Normal Halloween events in the city go on side-by-side with terror attacks.
Young friends attend the launch party for The Ultimate Halloween Party App.
“Before you can experience The Ultimate Halloween Party App, you must choose between three themes. Number one: Classic Monsters.”
The Frankenstein Monster and Dracula both burst out of the house. Marcus laughed at his own involuntary step back before the creatures dissolved into pixels.
“Number two: Haunted House.”
A startling shriek filled Marcus’s hearing as translucent, skull-faced specters rushed through the doorway and out into the night before vanishing.
“Or number three: Gore Factory.”
A hockey-masked maniac with a machete in one hand and a dripping, freshly-severed head in the other thrust out of the house and disappeared....
The app is more than a way to use a cell phone to catch Pokémon. The tech is downloaded to the brain in this world; app characters and scenarios are blended seamlessly with everyday surroundings.
(Good thing the political factions and the government won't use it to recruit monster-killers. Who would determine the monsters, anyway? Well, I think we know.)
Morton does a fine job wresting strangeness and novelty from the Halloween party cliché.
I Wait for You by Eygló Karlsdóttir
“Sometimes you don’t remember why you’re here,” he said. “You rage through the house looking for something and never seem to find it. When I was nineteen you spent the entire night shaking the mirror in my room so violently that it shattered into a thousand pieces.”
“The entire night?”
“Always Halloween,” he added.
“All Hallow’s Eve,” she whispered. “When the souls of the dead go roaming.”
"I Wait for You" begins as a poignant mother and child reunion on Halloween night. But the living can equal the dead in the horror of their revelations.
Dust Upon a Paper Eye by Cate Gardner
An old theater. A one-off Halloween show starring performing dolls. Gardner selects just the right ingredients: physical uncertainty, financial insecurity, and production secrecy are carefully amalgamated in a dreadful and accomplished short story.
"Who would want a doll that only danced on Halloween?"
The Nature of the Beast by Sharon Gosling
[….] Ten disappearances at the rate of two a month for the past five, though it had taken a while for the police to realize what they were dealing with. There was no obvious connection between the victims other than their proximity to Carlisle and the kind of bad luck that goes with vulnerability. Drug dealers, drug addicts. Runners on the fells, old people going out for morning papers, children failing to return from games with friends: people disappearing into the uncertain light of dawn and dusk....
"The Nature of the Beast" is the strongest story I have read thus far in The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories. Its scope is ambitious, text and subtext finely imbricated.
Detective Sgt. Cassie Wish and her husband Nick have moved from the big city to his hometown, Penrith, in the Cumbrian fells. Wish is used to big city carnage, having been on the receiving end since childhood. Before the move, she was part of the
National Crime Agency's trafficking task force. Now she is in a small town where people are disappearing and Halloween is approaching, coincident with a local holiday: The Winter Droving.
Gosling has organized story material sufficient to fuel a 400-page novel, turning it into a finely balanced and suggestive non-supernatural gore carnival.
In the Year of Omens (2014) by Helen Marshall
"In the Year of Omens" is a weird mood piece punctuated by seemingly small gaps between sound and sense, between acts and their meanings. The year is Leah's fourteenth; her friends experience auspices of death, and then they die. Leah's father died, too, but more prosaically. Her infant brother Milo wastes away, or was he always just sticks? Her mother refuses to explain any of it.
“No,” she tried to tell her mum. “No, this is where I am supposed to be. This is supposed to be it.”
And then Leah was standing in a doorway, not in the car at all, and it was a different dream. She was standing in a doorway that was not a doorway because there was nothing on the other side. Just an infinite space, an uncrossable chasm. It was dark, but dark like she had never seen darkness before, so thick it almost choked her. And there was something moving in the darkness. Something was coming … because that’s what omens were, weren’t they? They meant something was coming....
White Mare by Thana Niveau
Thana Niveau's atmospheric rural horror story "White Mare" had me thinking back to other stories about similarly out-of-place families. Robert Westall's "Yaxley's Cat" (1991) came immediately to mind. Stories about city people transgressing unwritten immemorial local rules overflow the roster of tv and film horror texts, too. "White Mare" is certainly their equal, if not their superior.
A father and teenage daughter from the U.S. relocate to Thorpe Morag, "a small Somerset village nestled in a valley in the middle of wet green nowhere." They are there to settle a distant aunt's estate, selling off her farm, house, and contents. Everything except her mare, Callisto.
Heather's father is wrapping things up by Halloween. But by then the dread is palpable: Niveau has provided us with enough accumulated glimpses, hints, sensations, and insinuations in the local landscape and courtesy of local teens that we know a night of horror is at hand.
A white sheet draped the person holding the awful clacking head. At least Heather hoped there was a person under there. What she’d first taken for a monster was only a skull. A horse’s skull, long and gaunt and grinning horribly. Someone had filled the empty eye sockets with gleaming red baubles.
Her dad shouted over the noise. “Go on! Get out of here!”
But the crowd continued to chant, growing louder and louder. The horse-man capered on the step, dancing in a circle. The skull reared back, its mouth open in silent laughter, before jerking down again and appearing to look straight at Heather. She screamed....
* * *
In his introduction to The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories, editor Stephen Jones lays out his goals:
There have, of course, been numerous anthologies devoted to Halloween before, and so I wanted to make sure that I presented as wide a range of stories and themes as possible in this latest addition to the canon.
Over the following pages you will discover some remarkable writers—both well-established and relative newcomers—and a breadth of creative ideas that hopefully tap into all the many aspects—supernatural and psychological—that make Halloween such a memorable festival. Not all of them are horror stories, but then the holiday itself is many things to different people and continues to evolve and reinvent itself as we move further into the twenty-first century.
Halloween anthologies are now proliferating rapidly, but The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories, published only five years ago, is the place to start. It is a rich selection displaying the variety and craftsmanship of today's horror writers.
Jay
19 October 2023
