TITLE: Halloween Season
AUTHOR: Lucy A. Snyder
168 pages, Raw Dog Screaming Press, ISBN 9781947879218 (paperback, e-book)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Halloween is the most wonderful part of the year for many of us. For dedicated fans, the season begins when the leaves start turning autumn colors and doesn't finish until Hallowtide ends in November. With it comes a whole lot of fun: scary movies and stories, haunted houses, seasonal sweets, spooky decorations, costume parties, and of course trick or treat. But Halloween is also a deeply spiritual time for some; it's an opportunity to remember and honor loved ones who have passed on. Master storyteller Lucy A. Snyder has filled her cauldron with everything that Halloween means to her and distilled it into a spell-binding volume of stories. Within these pages you'll find thrills and chills, hilarity and horrors, the sweet and the naughty. One of the best things about Halloween is you don't have to be yourself. So go ahead and try on a new mask or two ... you may discover hidden talents as a witch, a pirate, a space voyager, a zombie fighter, or even an elf. This is the perfect collection to celebrate the season of the dead or to summon those heady autumn vibes whenever you like. You may even find a couple of tales that evoke a certain winter holiday that keeps trying to crowd in on the fun. In the worlds within this book, every day is Halloween!
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS: To a lot of people, Winter is the ‘deadest’ time of the year by natural standards (at least in the eyes of most people). But Autumn, and especially October and Halloween, seem to be when our minds fixate on loss, death and, consciously or not, to the possibility of the supernatural encroaching on our lives. While a new Lucy A. Snyder short story collection is welcome any time of year, her latest, Halloween Season, is perfectly timed to remind us how well she understands the overlapping emotions of the season at hand. A number of the stories included here center on loss (emotional, physical or both) or the intrusion (subtle or obvious) of the supernatural into the mundane world and how easy it is for most people to ignore signs that should be blatant. But Halloween also comes with a certain humorous aspect – the “trick or treat” aspect of the holiday – and this collection, like the season itself, has a fair amount of comedy (some broad, some nuanced) interwoven.
The set-up of “Hazelnuts and Yummy Mummies” is pure comedy: insecure author at a convention accidentally gets fed cookies laced with hallucinogens. On a sitcom, hilarity would ensue. And in Snyder’s hands it does, for a moment, before the main character enters something of a Halloween twist on A Christmas Carol, seeing images of her past losses (father, stepfather, mother), her distant family’s present, and her own near future – not necessarily in that order. The sense of grief is palpable, as is the main character’s personal insecurities. And I love how Snyder subtly makes it clear whether this is an actual supernatural encounter or all in the main character’s head.
“Cosmic Cola” starts out with a feeling of loss: the tween-age main character has been uprooted by her mother and stepfather to move to a new town in New England that she’s sure she’s going to hate, until she finds out the town goes all out for Halloween and she’s invited to a limited-access party the entire town talks about. Things are, of course, not what they seem. The Lovecraftian horror element slowly suffuse the story, but the real emotional meat of the story are the scenes between the main character and her overwhelmed mother, which grow more fraught as the story continues.
“Visions of the Dream Witch” is one of the stories in this collection that I read when it was originally published, a jaunt into the bayous as a character seeks help for herself and her injured cousin after an encounter with a particularly powerful Lovecraftian witch and her minions. The loss and grief here are of the impending kind – if help isn’t available, the cousin will die – but the danger, from both the titular witch and another source, drive the story. It’s a trippy, water-drenched story I was happy to revisit.
I have to admit to not being as familiar with Snyder’s Jessie Shimmer character as I should be. I haven’t read any of the novels. So “What Dwells Within” feels like a good introduction to the character and her world, with enough backstory sprinkled in so I didn’t feel lost but still felt intrigued to learn more.
In “The Porcupine Boy,” a young man with a troubled past is trying to build his future by being a home-health aide to an elderly woman. He runs into complications when the woman’s primary doctor is replaced due to retirement. That indictment of the health insurance/private practitioner field is just the set-up of a story that gets wonderfully weird and dark, with a glint or two of karma-based humor along the way.
If any of Snyder’s stories were going to used as an actor monologue, “In the Family” is the best candidate. The narrator is talking to the recently-found child of her sister, years after the child had been put up for adoption. The sense that something is wrong builds slowly, through what the narrator chooses to say and how she chooses to say it, and the payoff at the end is pitch-perfect creepy.
Snyder is absolutely one of the best authors working in Lovecraftian cosmic horror, by making it personal. “The Kind Detective” proves this. The main character decides to investigate a rash of tree disappearances (yes. Trees. Disappearing.) that seem to be driving the people who witness them to insanity or suicide. It’s a dark story from the start and just gets darker, with the conclusion being perfectly in character for the titular detective.
“A Preference for Silence” is a neat bit of sf-horror-comedy aboard a colony ship with only two crewmembers awake and running things. Actually, this is another one that would make a great monologue for an actor.
“Wake Up Monkey You’re About to Die” is one of two Christmas-themed stories in the book and is the more horrific/bizarro of the two. I can’t say I was every completely sure what the background/worldbuilding was, but it was internally consistent and the story is full of great one-liners and comedic timing down to the last sentence.
Likewise, “The House That Couldn’t Clean Itself” is more near-future-sf/comedy featuring classic sloppy roommates and an attempt at a robotic solution to the problem that goes horribly awry. I giggled a lot (and hopefully that was Snyder’s intent).
The final two stories in the collection are preceded by a short poem pointing out that they’re “rated R.” They’re not erotic, and they’re more funny that horrific – and they’re two of my favorite pieces in the book. I’ve read “The Toymaker’s Joy” before. It’s the second Christmas-themed story in the collection, focused on an Elf who might not be cut out for the job she currently has but may be perfect for a spot I Santa’s “toys for adults” division. “The Tingling Madness” brings erotic sensations to the Lovecraft Mythos via local access television channels devoted to Cthulhu cults and … Chuck Tingle? You have to read it to see the connection. It made me laugh out loud at least twice.
Halloween Season hit the sweet spot for me. It has just enough stories to show the diversity in Snyder’s work without being too long as a whole, it shows off the author’s sense of humor as well as her horror chops, and it even comments on our current consumer culture that allows Christmas decorations to go up alongside (and sometimes even before) Halloween decorations. Definitely worth seeking out ASAP!
I received an Advance Review Copy from the publisher.