I Can Swing You from a Tree, I Can Sting You with a Bee...Samhain I Am

By Tony Fonseca

Sarrantonio, Al. Hallows Eve. New York: Leisure, 2004. 326 p.

01/17/2005

In 2002 Al Sarrantonio introduced us to the upstate New York town called Orangefield in the novel of that name (Cemetery Dance, 2002), which was itself somewhat of a spin-off of his novella Hornets. Although critics found that Orangefield fell  "short of the haunting Halloween spirit that [Sarrantonio] evoked effectively in the novel October (1990) and the stories collected in Toybox (1999)," Orangefield was an effective portrayal of a small town America where holidays such as The Pumpkin Days Festival ruled the lives of farmers. Unfortunately for the citizenry of this northern Mayberry (but not entirely of  their own fault) their merrymaking awakens the Celtic Lord of Death, Samhain, who works as sort of an indentured servant to the mysterious Dark One. Samhain's charge? To usher in an era of chaos and death of course, and usually in the most brutal way possible.

Samhain has no trouble finding three Orangefielders who are weak enough to be controlled and then turned into the requisite sacrificial lambs that can usher in evil on Halloween. These characters, Aaron Peters (a Somalia vet suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder), Jordie (a borderline psychopath) and Annabeth Turner (a curious teenager) all play a role in Sarrantonio's sequel, Hallows Eve, for their suicides help bring to life forces that before then are merely voices in the heads of the main characters.

Hallows Eve begins with the return to Orangefield of Corrie Phaeder, who left as a young adult to become a photographer in California. The voices in thirty-year-old Corrie's head convince him to return to his ancestral home, and to the house which neighbors shun because of the "weird shit" associated with it. Indeed, Corrie's return is not accidental, for one of the enemies of Samhain, an animated scarecrow named John with a Jack-O-Lantern for a head, informs him that the house and the town need him in order to survive. This does not mean that Corrie will be greeted by a normality contingent upon his return to Orangefield. The situation is quite the opposite, for as John explains, Corrie is there to bring events to a head (no pun intended). While doing so, Corrie must manage to protect his childhood love, a librarian named Kathy Marks who once tried to commit suicide as well "and who also hears the voices" and a seven-year-old neighbor named Regina, who possesses crude versions of powers that Corrie himself has and is just starting to understand.

Meanwhile, Samhain plots to stop Corrie and police officer Bill Grant, a hardboiled type who is slow to believe that the "weird shit" going on in Orangefield is in any way supernatural, but who eventually comes around to believe that there is evil afoot, and that something named Samhain is at the center of it. Grant visits the Reynolds, a mother and son team who are the last remaining relatives of the historian who wrote about Orangefield's connection to the netherworld, and begins researching past instances of mysterious occurrences himself. One of the best scenes in the novel occurs between Grant and Samhain, when the servant of the Dark One figures out that the police officer is on his trail:

He [Grant] took out his notebook and flipped to the page with the Reynold's telephone number on it.

There was the slightest of movements behind him, and then a voice said: "Perhaps I can help."

Grant was not a jumpy man, but he nearly lept out of his chair, spilling his drink as he spun around. His hand was already to his shoulder holster, drawing his 9mm as he turned.

The kitchen door was open. In the opening floated what looked like a black cloak surrounding an amorphous figure....

After realizing that he cannot shoot a spirit, Grant lowers his gun, and Samhain gives him the reason for his unannounced visit:

"There are things I can do, Detective Grant, and things I cannot do," Samhain said. "Certain...humans, of a weaker mind, can be handled. Someone like you, on the other hand, would be impossible to influence directly."

"But there's always the indirect approach. Your wife, for instance. Her doctor, or the attendant he left her care to, I should say, could be handled."

Samhain's threat is not an idle one, as he has already arranged for Grant's wife to die in a freak electroshock accident, on the same day that he has influenced a local alcoholic to cut Grant's mentor, a retired officer named Riley, from stomach to chin, so Grant knows that the creature is serious when Samhain tells him to back off of his investigations. The rest of the novel follows Grant, Phaeder and Reggie (Regina) as they inexorably move towards a confrontation with the Lord of the Dead.

A Bram Stoker award winner, Sarrantonio is a crafty writer by anyone's definition, and he is most at home when he is creating surrealistic nightmares that walk amongst humans during their day-to-day activities. He compares favorably to Douglas Clegg and Tom Piccirilli in this respect, and in many ways, particularly in visual appeal and his ability to not allow the nightmares to become unintentionally comical, is their superior. He does have his weaknesses however, and some of those rear their ugly heads in Hallows Eve. For one, he spends a lot of time developing and following Grant, who essentially does very little in the grand scheme of the novel and doesn't serve as a central consciousness for he barely reacts when both his wife and mentor suddenly die grisly deaths. Sarrantonio also has a tendency to build up great expectations, and then have no clear sense of the inevitable in plot. One could say he creates brilliant nightmares, but then doesn't know how to resolve them with the waking world of normality.

But one also gets the sense that if Sarrantonio keeps at it long enough, he is going to get it just right, and when he does, it'll be one hell of a scary, surrealistic ride. Hallows Eve concludes with the hint that the battle is over, but the war is ongoing, that other Orangefield adventures will follow closely on the heels of this one. Reviewers who are critical of Hallows Eve state that if that is the case, they will be holding out for more than a "rehash of past Halloween tricks and treats." This reviewer, however, will definitely be picking up the next Orangefield adventure "with or without imperfections." Though not yet masterful, Sarrantonio's novels are still readers' best chances of finding viable--and scary--surrealistic horror.