My first and only Halloween book

On a recent trip to Maine, my parents gave me a big box  of stuff from my childhood that had been living in their attic ever since they moved out of my childhood home 17 years ago. It contained many a gem, including teen heartthrob magazines from 1986 and 1987, Michael J. Fox pinups removed (because I’d put them on my bedroom wall),  various souveniers and t-shirts, and piles and piles of  old school papers, drawings and independent works of poetry, prose and art.

It is one of those early works that I give to you below — The Halloween Book, copyright 1980 (annotated).  I wrote it when I was six, and today I revisit it, as a professional writer.

Nice, simple authoritative title. Bold use of color. Evocative illustration of what appears to be an un-dead thumb. These ran rampant in the tri-state area in the early 80s. Along with big hair, Jordache jeans, and men in white vans who kidnapped children. Not sure what the green blotches are…ectoplasm? This book pre-dates Ghostbusters by several years, so probably not.

“Halloween night children were getting ready.” Strong start, run-on sentence notwithstanding. It orients the reader in time and place, and jumps right into the action. Is that thing that looks like a well shaft in front of the house a booby trap for unsuspecting trick-or-treaters, or an attempt to draw a front walk by a child who hasn’t yet grasped the concept of perspective? It’s left ambiguous, and my interest as a reader is piqued.

Next, we meet “the big happy jack-o-lantern,” presumably the protagonist of our story. It’s not clear what the orange spirals orbiting him are meant to represent; bits of his entrails? Peelings? Surely all will be revealed.

On the next spread, we meet two new characters.  Tom, a ghost (but not the thumb kind) and Beth, a prinsess” (sic.), who is totally jacked. Nice work, Beth!

I believe we’re meant to assume that Tom and Beth are wearing Halloween costumes, and aren’t actually a ghost and a prinsess. If they are a ghost and a prinsess, then I’m not quite clear on the genre of this book. (Horror? Fantasy?)

I’m hoping that pretty soon we’ll find out how the lives of these three characters — Tom, Beth and the jack-o-lantern — intersect.

OK, at this point, I’m feeling like too many characters are being front-loaded into the narrative. We should at least get to know the characters we’ve already met a little better, and get an understanding of the central conflicts of the book, before Sandy dressed up like a witch (and apparently drawn horribly the first time, hence the pasted-in overlay) and Sue the clown  (or Sue dressed up as a clown?) appear on the scene.

Based on their deltoids, these two have apparently been working out with Beth, so maybe there’s an important plot point there. If those three end up in the well shaft at that house from page one, they may be able to climb their way right out thanks to their insane upper body strength. Cool.

BUT, I’m feeling even more confused about genre. Is this a historical novel? Sandy and Sue weren’t, to my knowledge, popular baby names in the 70’s, when these characters would have been born, so maybe this takes place in the 1950s?

OK, now we get some action: The children go trik or treating. Not sure who the devil character is, or why he put his pitchfork down right as he was showing up at the door (or who, exactly, he’s talking to), but he looks like he’s part of Beth’s workout club. He also looks sort of like Gerard Depardieu. Hope the booby trap doesn’t get him.

On the next page, we learn that the children get lots of candy — so much candy, and so uniformly shaped, in fact, that it arranges itself in neat rows in a bowl. The fact that it’s unwrapped is worrisome, especially if this book *does* take place in the 80s, when the nation was in the grips of the poisoned Halloween candy panic.  So now I’m thinking maybe this book is a straight-up thriller.

Wait – WHAT?? Time for candy corn? Look at all the good things to eat? Is the author directly addressing the reader now? Is this experimental fiction? What happened to Sandy, Sue, Beth, Tom and the big happy Jack-o-lantern? Is the devil / Gerard Depardieu guy still alive? And what is that underneath the Hershy’s bar? Rhubarb?

Yikes! There is NOTHING scarier than a topsy-turvy house — especially one capable of thinking about punctuation marks  — and I would *almost* be on the edge of my seat here, but I don’t know who’s speaking. Tom? Beth? Some well-meaning parental figure we haven’t met yet? Or maybe Sandy, the rival “hag”? ( Whichever character it was, they’ve obviously got a seriously ageist / misogynist streak, so as a modern reader, I’m inclined to be unsympathetic toward them. Maybe the so-called hag is simply a brilliant older woman and talented architect with a cubist sensibility.)

OK, so now the author — or someone? — is weighing their candy.  Which they’ve put in a miniature silo. This book is really, really strange, but I’m kind of just rolling with it now.

Holy shit — I *am* looking at that black cat, and I’m wondering if I’m tripping because that cat has a one-eyed rat face and an “S” for a tail! WTF? And someone is a TV set! Someone who? Is it the devil / Gerard Depardieu kid from before, in a new costume? Why? And OH DEAR GOD HIS ARMS ARE SO LONG!

I miss Tom and Beth and Sandy and Sue. I hope they’re not in the well shaft.

Whoah — I’d say Billy is very happy, indeed. In fact, it looks like Billy has just done a few lines of coke. (Which would suggest that the book is, in fact, set in the time when it was written.) I don’t know who this  guy is, but A.) He’s kind of a badass for doing hard drugs and not bothering with a costume on Halloween and B.) I think he works out with Beth.

On the next page, Billy has sobered up and is contemplating the moon, which is sort of poignant, especially given his addiction, although it would be a lot more so if we’d met Billy earlier in the book and had gotten to really know him as a character.

Wow — this is just bad. It’s like the author couldn’t figure out how to tie up all the loose ends so she just gave up. Either that or maybe her mom called her for dinner, so she had to wrap things up, or The Muppet Show came on and she was like, “screw this.”

Alas, sadly, as readers we’re left with more questions than answers: Who is even that in the bed? (Steroid Beth? Cokehead Billy?) Why are they just a head? And what’s that floating in the air? (A paramecium? A zeppelin?) Why does the mother in the picture have hockey sticks for legs?

And: Is it just me, or does that mom look a LOT like Sue the clown? I’m not sure what, exactly, we’re supposed to take from this last detail, but part of me wonders if the author had a sequel in mind, and just never got around to writing it—for almost forty years and counting. We can only hope that someday she will.