Six Stories from Halloween (2011) edited by Paula Guran
"That was what Halloween was all about, wasn’t it? Remembering the dead and celebrating hard because you weren’t one of them."*
Readers unfamiliar with Halloween (2011) may prefer to read these notes only after reading the anthology.
Paula Guran's anthology Halloween (2011) offers a varied selection of stories. It's a useful collection to own, as is its sequel, Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (2013).
Below are notes on a few stories from the 2011 book.
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"Auntie Elspeth's Halloween Story, or the Gourd, the Bad and the Ugly" (2001) by Esther M. Friesner is a dire attempt at holiday humor. Told in first-person by the titular garrulous windbag as she entertains a nephew and niece in her cell at the nursing home ('spelled “hellhole”').
"On the Reef" by Caitlín R. Kiernan is a brief, magisterial third-person contribution to post-1927 Innsmouth and its sect's survivors. It is the strongest and most accomplished of the stories here noted.
Beyond the lower falls of the Castle Neck (which the Wampanoag tribes named Manuxet), where the river takes an abrupt southeastern turn before emptying into the Essex Bay, lies the shattered waste that once was Innsmouth.
"On the Reef" has a large scope, and it's atmospherics rise to sublimity:
To the west—over the wooded hills beyond Essex Bay and the vast estuarine flats at the mouth of the Manuxet River—there are brilliant flashes of lighting, despite the cloudless sky. And, at this moment, as far away as Manchester-by-the-Sea, Wenham and Topsfield, Georgetown and Byfield, hounds have begun to bay. Cats only watch the sky in wonder and contemplation. The waking minds of men and women are suddenly, briefly, obscured by thoughts too wicked to ever share. If any are asleep and dreaming, their dreams turn to hurricane squalls and drownings and impossible beasts stranded on sands the color of a ripe cranberry bog. In this instant, the land and the ocean stand in perfect and immemorial opposition, and the kneeling women who wear the golden masks are counted as apostates, deserting the continent, defecting to brine and abyssal silt. The women are tilting the scales, however minutely, and on this night the sea will claim a victory, and the shore may do no more to protest their desertion than sulk and drive the tides much farther out than usual....
"The Sticks" by Charlee Jacob takes place in a swamp-adjacent southern U.S. town named Sticks. Its righteous founders, while still in the old country, had made enemies of the original deities worshiped on Halloween. Now, in Sticks, every Halloween plays like a parody of Egyptian plagues: water moccasins, mosquitoes, and finally the hunt for a child to sacrifice on the thirty-first.
Parents--animated by we know not what--go house to house in a band. Children cower behind locked doors. It's a wrenching story, dense in detail, as we follow the night of dread of a young brother and sister.
"By the Book" (2010) by Nancy Holder is a clever, well-observed story about a wife and mother who needs help. The kind of help only a paperback romance novel can provide.
A trickster takes the form of a young trick-or-treater in Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "Pranks" (2009), causing no end of trouble for the kids he falls in with.
"Night Out" by Tina Rath is an artful, endearing story about a witch getting her house in order before heading to a holiday gathering.
"The Great Pumpkin Arrives at Last" by Sarah Langan is grim as hell, a beautiful and elegantly balanced story about a dead-end couple who finally get the news during a Halloween seance.
"Sugar Skulls" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro begins:
The day after tomorrow would be el Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, the Feast of All Souls. Today was the Eve of the Feast of All Saints, when children in the big country to the north put on foolish clothing and went to take food from their neighbors, or played tricks on them for refusing their demands—it was one of the many strange customs that prevailed among those people with their big houses and big cars and yellow-haired women....
Refugio's mother is dead, her father is in prison. She lives with her grandmother, and as the story opens is a teen facing a life of poverty in every sense of the word..
[....] Abuela Concepcion stopped her labor for a moment. “I promised your mother to give you that chance.”
“The bruja has said she’ll teach me her skills,” said Refugio.
“No!” Abuela Concepcion held up her hand almost as if to strike Refugio. “You should have nothing to do with her—nothing!”
Two roads diverged... Which will a personalized sugar skull signal for a prosperous future?
In "Sugar Skulls," future expectations are a world away from those depicted as part of "teen life" in U.S. Halloween tales.
Jay
20 October 2023
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*Steve Rasnic Tem, "Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street"
