"Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street" (1999) by Steve Rasnic Tem

Halloween (2011) Edited by Paula Guran

Readers unfamiliar with "Tricks & Treats" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.One Night on Halloween Street" may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.

Tem always conveys excitement. Even when stories open as somber and chaotic rhetorical collages, lines and edges are clear.

His Halloween Street stories are nightmare material. Initially. His skill lies in peeling back a layer or two of obvious horror signage so nerves and sinews of a different everyday can be explored. This is a rigorous and highly skilled method of storytelling.

“Halloween Street” (1999), a separate story with the same setting, explores the transformation of a girl named Laura from an affectless and spectral child, alien to herself and her family, as she finally (metaphorically) gives birth to her real self and finds home. Tem opens this story with a quaking frantic x-ray as Laura’s parents finally argue her strangeness. But parental horror and anxiety deftly portrayed is only the beginning of Tem’s story about Laura.

Physically, Halloween Street itself is also sketched: its peculiar houses; their architecture perhaps expressing individual personalities.

"Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street" (1999) is a text composed of vignettes about Halloween Street. Physical setting is economically conveyed. But it is the experiences of characters in each vignette that is telling. None live on Halloween Street, but their time trick-or-treating there grants revelation and insight:

A gang of teenagers spend their first Halloween together after the death of their friend Tommy.

     Sandra and Willona had both had crushes on Tommy. And now he was going to be their boyfriend forever. He used to take them both to the horror shows, even the ones they were too young for. He knew places he could get them in. Sandra thought about those shows a lot—she figured Willona did, too. Tommy loved the horror shows. Now he was the star of his own horror show that played in their heads every night. He’d always be with them, because they just couldn’t stop thinking about him.

     Sometimes it felt so great just to be alive, now that somebody you knew was dead. Sandra thought that must be the ugliest feeling in the world, but it was real. That was what Halloween was all about, wasn’t it? Remembering the dead and celebrating hard because you weren’t one of them.

A sister and her annoying brother trick-or-treat together.

     She tried to walk as far away from him as possible so that maybe people wouldn’t know that he was her brother. But people always knew anyway. Like she had a big sign: J.P.’S SISTER, painted on her forehead.

     J.P. was acting stupid again. Susan was sorry she’d brought him along, as usual, but she never had any choice anyway. J.P. always went where he wanted to go, and unfortunately the places he wanted to go always seemed to be the places she wanted to go.

A solitary little boy with an impossibly large treat sack makes an easy target for older bullies.

     So they stopped him, and they took the big sack away from him, and just for a moment they considered dropping it and running away because the sack was so light, and felt so strange in their hands—like an oily cloud as it rose and drifted and hummed as the October wind wrapped it around them. 

     But they just had to look inside.

Terminally ill kids at a hospice finally decide on their costumes.

     Each kid had wrapped his or her body in the stiff brown butcher’s paper. Wide rolls of tape were used to fasten the pieces together securely. When they were all done they looked like a walking line of packages.

Are clowns a spreading contagion? A girl realizes there are more of them every trick-or-treat. “And half of them didn’t carry treat sacks. And half of those were too large to be children in disguise.”

     Sometimes all you could see were the spaces where the eyes were missing. Sometimes all you could see was the space where the mouth was missing. 

     She thought it must be terrible pretending to smile all the time. She thought it must be terrible to be a smile.

Ronald opens the door to a trick-or-treater wearing a Ronald mask. The boy won’t explain when Ronald asks where he got it, and runs away.

     Then finally the little boy turned onto Halloween Street and Ronald felt pretty good about that because he knew Halloween Street was a dead end. But he wasn’t ready for all the kids trick-or-treating there, hundreds of them of all sizes, and all of them wearing these masks with Ronald’s own face.

These are summaries on a small handful of vignettes in "Tricks & Treats: One Night on Halloween Street." It is a story of melodic poignancy. Tem is never tempted to rely on easy weeping when narrating his ends of October, ends of childhood, and ends of life.

Perhaps because -- and this is only my own thought -- Halloween Street is not a straightaway? Perhaps it is an ouroboros?

Jay