Pumpkin Spikes: Trick'r'Treating with Jack Fisher's Octoberland (2002)

 

    

That cover sort of reminds me of this immortal ad, which was running around the same time the book came out. 

Anyway. . .an obscure Halloween surprise today, this is Octoberland, edited by Jack Fisher and published in 2002 by the New Jersey-based Flesh and Blood Press. Per ISFDB (which, by the way, is a fantastic website about, well, the fantastic), F&B put out 14 books in the early 2000s, mostly collections and anthologies. 

This book seems pretty obscure, and it wasn't cheap to acquire. However, it did contain  a surprise. . .

Ouch! Sorry, Mark!  But deaccessions do happen, I get it. And in this case, Davenport's loss may be our gain. So let's crack this open and take a look inside!

Octoberland by Wendy Rathbone

Synopsis: Nothing to summarize, just a quick little poem about October and Halloween.

Trick or Treat? Treat, but it's candy corn: Seasonally appropriate and it wouldn't be Halloween without it, but not incredible.

Thoughts: A fine way to open the book and set the mood, and solid in its own right. Not much more to say here.

Dancing Into October Country by Monica J. O'Rourke

Synopsis: Halloween Man comes into town, delighting and terrorizing the children.

Trick or Treat? Treat

Thoughts: I've only ever read O'Rourke in the extreme horror context, so I was expecting (and hoping) for something like that. This isn't, but it's quite worthwhile. We're in prose territory here, but only just--this is another tone poem about Halloween and its delights and those of us who chase them. It is good but feels redundant of the Rathbone piece. I would have put this at the end of the book, as an outro for all us boils and ghouls.

Keeper of the House by T. G. Arsenault

Synopsis: "Dr. Freak" is so-called by his friends because of his elaborate Halloween costumes and penchant for scaring the neighborhood. But a visit to an abandoned house brings him in contact with real terror.

Trick or Treat? Treat

Thoughts: The beginning of this is slow-going (and clunkily-written), but then it gets gross. This is what I imagine an RL Stine extreme horror version of Goosebumps would read like*. The way you reacted to that idea is I think how you'll react to this story. It doesn't make much sense but it's disgusting and has a couple memorable images. The 8 year old in me liked it.

*If you're curious, the most splatterpunk of the original Goosebumps books has got to be Calling All Creeps. Not in terms of graphic content (Welcome to Dead House is gorier) but in terms of hip, edgy nihilism. Calling All Creeps has attitude to burn, baby!

Frozen by Christian Westerlund

Synopsis: Little Timmy receives a visit from Mr. October at the height of spooky season.

Trick or Treat? Treat. Don't let the fact that I'm griping in the "Thoughts" section below fool you; everything so far has been entertaining and at least decently written.

Thoughts: It's good. There are some nice turns of phrase and images and I'm a sucker for Bradbury vibes. However, I will say there is only so much I'm interested in reading stuff that tells you how great Halloween is and all of the Halloween magic and mystery is You become contemporary country music (talking about how great all the stuff from the past is, and how special you and the audience are for enjoying it, but rarely creating anything of value in that tradition). And nobody wants that.

Post #153 by Jeffrey Thomas

Synopsis: A group of veterans (WWII, Vietnam, Desert Storm) have their Halloween gathering crashed by ghosts.

Trick or Treat? Treat

Thoughts: This is more like it. Good sense of place, good character interaction. It is a little hard to keep track of characters, although maybe that's my being disoriented by a story that actually has more than two or three. Of course, the "Rio Bravo but it's a VFW hall" idea has been done since this story was written, but I like this better.

However--I am a little unclear on the point. Some Nazis the WWII vets killed return, so presumably the war dead aren't the 'good guys' getting revenge on their killers. On the other hand, the presence of the Vietnamese kids suggests a 'justice from beyond the grave' theme (a more provocative spin could have been to make them child soldiers, but it's implied otherwise) and makes one of our heroes potentially quite hard to root for. Maybe it's just that everyone is still fighting their own wars--the end suggests that literally, and the metaphor is obvious. That's okay, I guess, but Rick McCammon's "Nightcrawlers" did the same thing already, and did it better. Still, this is such a break from what we've had so far in the book that I can overlook my own quibbles.

Grandma Yagaski's Barn by James A. Hartley

Synopsis: Jake is on a mission to prove he's not chicken by coming back from Grandma Yagaski's spooky pumpkin farm with a memento. He does without any incident or scary things and... ah, who are we kidding? It gets wild.

Trick or Treat? Treat, but not first pick. These are the Starbursts in the flavor you don't like that wind up at the bottom of your Halloween cache for you to eat two weeks later (we had effective candy rationing rules at my house!).

Thoughts: I love the description and sense of place in this story; it reminds me a bunch of the opening credits to Halloween 4. This felt like one of the stories you'd run into as a kid in a Bruce Coville anthology. It's cute!

So, why am I comparing it to stale Starbursts (if any food that processed can be said to go 'stale')? Because it's pat. Despite a couple twists to the particulars of how Grandma Yagaski and her barn are scary, the basic beginning, middle, and end all broadly play out just how you'd expect. Sometimes, that's part of the fun of genres (it's no small part of the appeal of everything from slasher flicks to Hallmark Channel Christmas movies). Here, in my opinion, it feels flat.

Side note: The name wrong-footed me, because I thought Granny was going to be Japanese but she ends up decidedly Russian. Maybe she's from Kamchatka?

The Tuatha by Jeremy C. Shipp

Synopsis: On Halloween night, the Tuatha feed on the children's fear. Mostly it's harmless, but when one of them crosses the line, Linna has to act.

Trick or Treat? Right at the trick/treat borderline. In other words, it's the equivalent of getting a toothbrush in your candy bag. Technically a treat (you're up a toothbrush), but it doesn't feel like it, does it?

Thoughts: One fun thing about reading fantasy and horror is the chance to encounter folklore from other cultural traditions. Here it seems we have the Tuatha de Danann, which are pre-Christian Gaelic fairies/gods (although I haven't found any references to them feeding on fear). This story peaks early on, with the description of the mischievous but essentially harmless Tuatha siphoning children's fear on Halloween night, followed by a nasty story of a gluttonous one who prefers to buy in bulk, as it were. And then the wheels come off. It's never clear exactly what the "rules" are, what the stakes are, or (in some cases) even who is doing what. As a result, it's hard to follow and harder to care.

The Jack-o'-Lantern Memoirs by Stephen Mark Rainey

Synopsis: On Halloween 1969, the Chicago Police Department gunned down the Jack-O'-Lantern Killer. He explains to us why that hasn't stopped the murders.

Trick or Treat? Treat. Like, full-sized candybar treat.

Thoughts: There's so much fun in here, like the off-hand references to the hideous tortures of the underworld or the way the narrator gets defensive about the ethnicities of his victims (The Jack-o'-lantern Killer appears to be an equal-opportunity murderer, but his post-mortem crime sprees find him in majority minority neighborhoods). It's good and mean fun that's not too unpleasant--sort of like a good TP'ing.

The Halloween Boy by William P. Simmons

Synopsis: A boy and his parents spend the most important day of the year together.

Trick or Treat? Treat

Thoughts: We start out with what seems like more faux-Bradbury rhapsodizing over autumn and Halloween, and I was worried we were back to the "tone poems without a ton of substance" part of the book after a few stories that, while mixed, were all doing something more with the holiday than talking about it. I was wrong; this is the second or third best story in the book, and one that honestly earns the Bradbury angle it's going for. This is a touching, moving story that's equal parts sad and hopeful. I love this story, it makes me smile, and it breaks my heart.

October Cries by L. H. Maynard and M. P. N. Sims

Synopsis: Carol and Mark and their son Jack have moved to a country cottage, to Mark's delight. But Carol isn't so sure about the place...especially when Jack begins acting strangely.

Trick or Treat? Treat

Thoughts: The horror elements aren't that interesting or effective for me. I don't need a lot of explanation about what's going on, and it is foreshadowed but it seems a bit tacked on. I do like the effective conflict between the husband and the wife about the cottage, and the build-up is good. Directionally, I like where the story goes. I just want a little bit more. You could probably make a solid A24 horror film out of this, though.

The Copper Mask by Scott Thomas

Synopsis: In 19th century Massachusetts, Abigail Safford discovers a mysterious copper mask.

Trick or Treat? Trick, largely based on placement.

Thoughts: I really should stress that none of the works in here are 'bad' as such--even the ones I like the least (and hence give them the 'trick' appellation) have a floor of quality that the 'worst' works in other anthologies don't reach. It's also the case that in a theme anthology, you're generally going to get stories going over the same plan of attack, so things can seem repetitive when they wouldn't if you encountered them as a one-off in a different anthology. This is another "what the world looks like on the darker side" tales, and it feels similar in particular to the first two works in the book. There is a difference--the first two pieces are more celebratory, while this is all dark. However, this is still just another story that sacrifices any but the most rudimentary narrative in favor of images, and it doesn't bring that much to the table.

The Splatterfairies' Hallowe'en, or a Maul and the Night Visitors by Denise Weeks

Synopsis: A coterie of fairies performing Halloween mischief discover one of their number has gone rogue.

Trick or Treat? Treat but too much sugar; it's like Fun Dip that way.

Thoughts: "Fairy" is not a word I like to see in a story title, but "Splatter" is, so I went into this hoping for the best but ready for the worst. The first sentence in this contained the word "prithee", which put my hackles up, but the fairy-talk generally works. 

What doesn't work, though: It's too long, there are a million fairies to keep track of, and there are paragraphs full of the other fairies being indignant while the psycho fairy giggles like a dweeb. The explanations for the minor inconveniences that afflict all of us (missing socks, linked-together paper clips) are fun, as is the nature of the fairies' "rules of engagement" with "the bigfolk." But...there's no splatter! Still, this is amusing.

Frost King by Tracy S. Morris

Synopsis: It's too cold for trick or treating, so Kit tells her grandson the story of The Frost King.

Trick or Treat? Trick

Thoughts: This isn't a Halloween story! It is technically a literal Halloween story (it takes place on Halloween night), but I did half wonder if this wasn't a pre-existing story that had a Halloween framing device stapled on it (and, in the process, stripping out most of the story's already meager suspense).

The story itself is okay. Morris does capture some of the high stakes danger of mountain climbing, and the dynamics of Kit being a double outsider (a foreigner and a woman) in Russia. However, this story is too disjointed. We lurch back and forth from mountaineering to the increasingly ponderous warning dreams from her father, and just when things get good, the threat melts away. I love the idea of the Frost King as a being that can be anywhere it's cold enough--it kind of reminds me of "The Wind" by Ray Bradbury.

Dove by Corrine De Winter

Synopsis: Mercy has left the city to be with her lover Nicholas in the country. But Nicholas has a secret. 

Trick or Treat? Trick

Thoughts: WHERE'S THE HALLOWEEN? In fairness, the book isn't Halloweenland, it's Octoberland. And, there is a lot of description of autumn in the first couple pages. However... the moment I realized the character was named Mercy because it's a metaphor was the moment I knew we were in trouble. I give it some points for the ending going a different direction than I thought it would, but this may be the weakest story in the bunch.

Why Cosmo Used to Wear a Lab Smock Every Halloween by Mark McLaughlin

Synopsis: Cosmo is an insufferable boor, pretentious and pedantic. One of his more harmless eccentricities is that he wears a lab coat every Halloween--but there's a dark secret behind this.

Trick or Treat? Treat, with reservations (I'm increasingly worried that these rankings are arbitrary, because most of these could go either way). I don't think the 'horror' core of the story works but everything around it is incredible.

Thoughts: Davenport did ya dirty, Mark! Cosmo is a solid entry into the "That Guy" pantheon, with his nicknames and fawning admirers and self-coined catchphrases and aphorisms. I know a guy like that, and you probably do too.  

The reason I'm not stronger on this story is the actual horror content. McLaughlin's description of the monsters in Cosmo's nightmares is good and pleasantly disgusting--it reminds me (in a good way) of those various "mad scientist lab" toys that let you make and dissect gross monsters, generally with ample applications of goop and slime. However, it feels out of place in this story. I feel weird saying that, because I am usually on the side that says horror fiction (especially contemporary horror fiction) needs less "the real monster is vague, aching trauma and guilt" and more "the real monster is seven feet tall with red eyes and intense curiosity about the taste of your spleen."

Maybe that's the point--this pompous windbag is being stalked by something much more terrifying to his nature, which is the threat of gross and visceral dismemberment. What could be scarier to someone who thinks they live the life of the mind than being reduced to a sack of organs? If it is, I think it needs to be more explicit.

The Dark Marquee by Trent Jamieson

Synopsis: A depressed and cuckolded university student discovers a way to get revenge through black magic.

Trick or Treat? Trick

Thoughts: A frustrating story, because there's good raw horsepower of the writing here. Jamieson creates a good sense of time and place from the first paragraph, and that continues. However, the actual story is very slight, and it feels more like an excuse for some graphic violence than anything else. In fairness, this seems to have been a relatively early story in Jamieson's career--I'd be interested in seeing something he wrote a decade later, because there is promise here.

Harming Obsession by Bev Vincent

Synopsis: Victor suffers from "Harm OCD," a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder centered around intrusive thoughts and fears of harming oneself or others. In Victor's case, he's particularly obsessed about accidentally running over a kid with his car. Bad luck for him then that he's currently behind the wheel on a rainy Halloween night.

Trick or Treat? Treat

Thoughts: An aside, about repeated stories: This is the first time that I'm reviewing a story I've discussed already, and it won't be the last. As much as possible, I plan to write something new/different about repeated stories. In this case, there isn't much to say because to say more gives it away. I will say, though, this is one of the most polished stories in the book. I prefer Rainey's story, but that also has the novelty of being a first time read, whereas with Vincent's I already know where it's going.

Eden's Gate by Kenneth Taylor

Synopsis: Three travelers take a very wrong turn.

Trick or Treat? Trick

Thoughts: Thank goodness Lovecraft didn't write sex because this is an example of what it's like and it's bad. Really bad. "I pressed my hand against the place that had risen tall against the material of my pants and then drew it away quickly, fighting the sudden urge to massage that place." There's a lot of this sort of thing, as well as the usual overheated Lovecraftian proclamations of doom.

If Jamieson's story is good writing undone by a weak and trite plot, this is a good story undone by poor writing. Taylor does create good atmosphere, and the creepy little Dover Demon monsters are scary and gross (sort of like Rick Hautala's "Little Brothers"). I also like the way that the story gets into the action faster than you might expect from the Lovecraftian writing style. However, that same style brings this story down. For a story this nasty and oversexed, I think you need something more like a straightforward Dick Laymon sort of style, or else turn some of these thousands of words into pictures and go the extreme horror comics route. That's obviously not an option for Octoberland, but I'd love to see this done up in a sleazy Bruce Jones Twisted Tales sort of comic.

Rapture by Charlee Jacob

Synopsis: Stray cat Soma has a very strange Halloween night.

Trick or Treat? Treat, although again the line is very thin. This was originally a 'trick,' but the writing is too good.

Thoughts: I came into this one with high expectations: A couple weeks ago, I read my first Jacob story, the Clive Barker-esque "The Plague Species," and found myself blown away. We'll talk more about that in a month or so when I lead us through the blood-soaked hallways of John Pelan's Darkside semi-series.

This isn't that, although (like the O'Rourke piece), Jacob channels the energy and zap of extreme horror into . It's confusing, in part because we're seeing the world through the eyes of a cat, but also because there's supernatural stuff afoot (apaw?). So, on the one hand there are things where Soma doesn't understand something that makes sense to humans, like when she interprets jack-o'-lanterns as warm orange cats (my favorite part of the story). On the other, there are parts where there is unusual supernatural activity, and then it's all confusing. Fundamentally this is a strong story--but nowhere near close to what Jacob at the height of her powers could do.

Spinner by Lauren Halkon

Synopsis: Kelly lives in a dystopian society where women are subject to extreme physical and social restriction. As she prepares to give birth, she has vivid visions of spiders. . . and hope.

Trick or Treat? Trick

Thoughts: We have a Handmaiden's Tale set-up here, some sort of Giger-esque techno-gynaecological world where women must remain silent and pump out babies. Somehow spiders and The Giver-style memories of happiness factor in. At no point, unless I'm being very dull, are we connected to Halloween or even October.

The writing is strong, with good edgy imagery and a social/political angle that's effective without being preachy. The spider imagery is also interesting and effectively repulsive. However, the overall point to the story isn't clear--I mean, I think I get why Halkon wrote this, but I don't get how the story accomplishes anything other than just painting a grim picture of a grotesque society. That in itself would be enough, but Halkon seems to be trying to communicate more with the spider imagery and it doesn't cohere well. Maybe if this appeared in a more overtly boundary-pushing anthology, like a Borderlands or a Darkside or even a Dangerous Visions it would be more effective. But this feels out of place. Again, that's not fatal to the story, but it doesn't help.

There Are Corners in the World Where Lost Things Gather by Robert Morrish

Synopsis: Our narrator recounts his drug-fueled youthful adventures with his older brother and his brother's girlfriend--including a Halloween trick that goes too far.

Trick or Treat? TREAT!

Thoughts: Morrish ends the book with a banger! This is a strong story, confident and competent in the writing and characterization.

It reminds me a little of Ketchum's Hide and Seek (straightforward story about young people one the outskirts that turns into a Laymonesque tale of an ill-advised trespassing adventure), but more plausible. The horror is grounded in a grotesque but credible version of reality, with just a few hints of darker and weirder things. Tons of fun.

Final Thoughts:

Do I recommend it? I'm not sure. Even the stories I liked least had a good moment or two, and the best ones (Vincent, Rainey, Simmons) are superb. The problem is this is an obscure little book, and it's not easy to find, and the copies that are out there aren't cheap. I'm glad I bought my copy, and it's certainly worth checking out if you stumble upon it at a reasonable price. However, this isn't essential, and you can find the Vincent and the Simmons stories elsewhere. This leaves the Rainey story, which is the best in the book, but seems (as yet) to be uncollected. These three stories, plus the many other delights found herein, would make this worth getting at cover price--but not at the multiples thereof it seems to be going for online. But if fate (or the deaccession department of a public library) throws this in your way, check it out.