Halloweenland

I love reading Al Sarrantonio's Orangefield books during the month of October. Even though the writing is less than stellar, the spooky little town with it's famous pumpkin festival and eerie Lord of the Dead sightings is the perfect setting to settle into around the time of Halloween.

Unfortunately, Halloweenland didn't live up to my expectations. It starts off creepily enough; a wife and her husband decide to have a baby, but the husband is late home from work on the night they had scheduled. The wife is awoken in the middle of the night by her husband's cold hands, apologizing for being late but says he made a promise and intends to keep it. The next morning the wife discovers that her husband died during the night, in a car crash, show more and was already pronounced dead before the time she thought she slept with him.

The book started out as a 70-page novella called The Baby and then was boosted up to a 230-page novel for this publishing. It's a stark contrast between the original and the additional content, not just because the extra text takes place five years later, but because it doesn't evoke that Halloween atmosphere that the series is known for. I found the 2nd part to be meandering and dull, and he also sort of ruined his Samhain character that he built up with the other books. The whole thing just kind of fell flat for me.

The original novella is actually included in the book too. I skimmed it, and it seems to be the first 70 pages copy-and-pasted with a couple different paragraphs at the very end.

I still think Horrorween Hallows Eve are nice books to read during Halloween and I would still recommend them, but this one just didn't do it for me. It's too bad. show less

Halloweenland is a novel that had its first breath as the short story ‘The Baby,’ and it is this short story which opens the book (and lasts the first 77 pages — and not to mention is included again at the end of the book as ‘The short Curious History of ‘The Baby”, serving no purpose but to seemingly take up space).

Marianne Carlin wants a baby more than anything else in this world. Her husband, Jack, would rather drink and hang out with his friends. On the night when they plan to conceive their child, Jack comes home late and smells of booze. But he promised, and so they make love. Marianne’s dream come true and she finds out she’s pregnant … problem is Jack died hours before they made love.

On top of that, Orangefield show more residents are once again reporting ‘Sam Sightings’—encounters with Samhain, the Lord of the Dead and alcoholic Detective Bill Grant is once again pulled into the fray. The hunt for Marianne’s evil offspring, who is a vessel for the Uncreator, takes him on a whirlwind journey spanning two continents as he tried to save the world.

On the whole, if Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen (with a little evangelical misinterpretation of Samhain thrown in) had a love child, you’d get Halloweenland. However, I really would have liked this novel better had the skewed views of Samhain not been included. That did not make me happy at all, and despite this being fiction, I longed to throw a history book at Sarrantino. Samhain is an Irish festival honoring the dead, not a god, geez! There was also not much horror—if any—and I really expected more from a Bram Stoker Award winner. Not once was I creeped out and this has me not wanting to rush out a read anything else by Sarrantino. 2.5 pumpkins out of 5.

http://www.read-all-over.net/fiction/horror/halloweenland-by-al-sarrantonio/ show less

Probably the best of the Orangefield novels. Hardboiled detective Bill Grant is Sarrantonio's best realized character and he stays for then entire novel here. Sarrantonio is trying to capture some of the feel of Charles L. Grant's Oxrun Station novels and stories but he just isn't the writer Grant is. Tying himself to the Halloween holiday especially makes it hard to provide sufficient variety to the plots. Unlike Oxrun Station, these novels should be read in the proper chronology (NOT the order they were written).

This is the third and final (so far) novel by Al Sarrantonio in his Orangefield series that focuses on the “Halloween-themed” supernatural events that occur in a small town in upstate New York called Orangefield. The first two novels in the series are Horrorween (which collects the short stories “Hornets” and “The Pumpkin Boy” as well as the novella “Orangefield”) and Hallows Eve. Sarrantonio’s first two books in this series are surprisingly hard to find and I have not yet been able to do so. In any case, Halloweenland was my first exposure to Sarrantonio’s fiction. (Special thanks to jseger9000 on the contents of Horrorween!)

Note: This review features plot spoilers -- read at your own risk.

The primary protagonist is show more Detective Bill Grant, an alcoholic widower who has spent a career dealing with the “weird shit” (as he calls it) that happens every Halloween season in Orangefield, New York. Many of these cases deal with the periodic appearance of “Samhain,” a foreboding figure whose appearance heralds impending doom and death. There are occasional allusions to some of the bizarre cases Grant has dealt with in the other Orangefield books, but they are adequately explained and I didn’t feel like I was missing out on a great deal having not read those. My interest in these previous cases was piqued, but not overly spoilered that I wouldn’t want to still read them. This time around, Grant must deal with a woman who is impregnated by her recently deceased husband – the book’s terrific opening depicts this (she doesn’t know he’s dead). The woman eventually gives birth to a daughter – deformed in some poorly-worded way and certainly not an ordinary baby – who is promptly whisked away by Samhain. As it turns out, this child heralds the potential end of the world (something Samhain is not exactly in favor of), and in a final mystic showdown, Samhain helps Grant in stopping her. I won’t delve any further into how these events unfold, save to mention that the antagonist Samhain is portrayed in what I felt was an increasingly sympathetic manner, and by the end of the novel, we get a taste of just who/what Samhain is.

Despite sharing many of the same themes as some of Ray Bradbury’s work (Halloween, autumnal spookiness, a dark carnival, etc.), Al Sarrantonio is not an evocative poet the way that Bardbury is. Sarrantonio’s prose is workmanlike and quick-moving. It’s perfectly fine for a thriller/horror novel. It doesn’t contain masterful word-weaving that will make you want to read it allowed to friends and family, but it also doesn’t interfere with the plot. Characterization of the human protagonists is very good; the antagonists (Samhain and the girl) are only hastily sketched out and could use some work, which weakened the novel’s climax for me.

It may be that I would have liked this book better had I read the first two Orangefield books, and while knowledge of them is by no means essential (I never felt lost), at least two other seemingly-important characters from the previous books come into play in the final quarter of the novel, so long-term readers of the series would likely enjoy encountering these characters once again.

My copy of Halloweenland also contains a copy of the novella “The Baby,” which is substantively identical to the first third of the novel, save that the ending chapter of “The Baby” was changed for the novel. While it’s nice to have a copy of “The Baby,” only the final few pages of it differ from what you’ve just read in Halloweenland, so there’s not all that much value added. For what it’s worth, I prefer the ending of “The Baby” to what happened in Halloweenland.

I give Halloweenland 3 stars out of 5. I wanted to like it more than the actual book warranted, but will probably still pick up Sarrantonio’s other Orangefield books when I see them.

Review copyright 2010 J. Andrew Byers show less

The devil impregnates a woman using her husband who is in-between life and death. The resulting baby disappears. The detective hero spends 5 years hunting for the little girl who spells doom for all living things. The climax comes at Halloween in an amusement park called Halloweenland. I was not impressed with this tale or the ‘hero’ who spends most of his time in a bottle.

Just okay. Nothing special. Little girl is really the devil, trying to end the world, not nearly as interesting as it sounds. Thought it would be about a Halloween carnival with all sorts of evilness, instead it was disappointing.

This was an entertaining tale. It once again proves that death makes a very likeable character. I skimmed through the short story at the end that the book was based on, but having just read the novel, I was only looking for the few differences between.