Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (Book Review)

Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre.  Edited by Paula Guran (Prime Books, 2013).

Guran's previous high-holiday effort, 2011's Halloween, was an indisputable October treasury; perhaps its only drawback was that it consisted strictly of reprints, meaning that ardent fans of Halloween fiction were likely to have encountered many of the selections before.  But Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre poses no such problem, presenting readers with eighteen (highly) original stories.  Some of the standouts:

*"Thirteen" by Stephen Graham Jones.  A tale (the best of its kind since Joe Hill's "Twentieth Century Ghost") that takes the haunted theater motif in a startlingly different direction.  Jones effort-lessly blends small-town reality with supernatural sinisterness.

*"The Mummy's Heart" by Norman Partridge.  This one features a monster kid run amok, a psycho who's seen one too many Karloff movies.  The real fun, though, starts when dark crime shades over into dark fantasy.  Lovers of the Universal monster movies will be enthralled by Partridge's re-bandaging of the mummy mythos.

*"Long Way Home: A Pine Deep Story" by Jonathan Maberry.  A quietly haunting piece in its own right, this narrative is also noteworthy for its depiction of Pine Deep several years after the cataclysmic events of the novel trilogy (cf. Stephen King's "One for the Road").  "Long Way Home" excitingly suggests that Maberry is a long way from done with mining the Most Haunted Town in America for story material.

*"The Halloween Men" by Maria V. Snyder.  The most Bradbury-esque entry in the anthology, but the Bradbury of the dystopian
"Usher II" more than Something Wicked This Way Comes.  Snyder's alternate-Venice setting is captivating, and her carnivalesque reworking of the idea of the Halloween mask is terribly clever.

*"Whilst the Night Rejoices Profound and Still" by Caitlin R. Kiernan.
A work that transports readers to a colonized Mars in the far future, yet hearkens back to the ancient Celtic roots of Halloween. Kiernan's story is to be cherished both for its diligent world-building and its mesmerizing prose.

*"We, the Fortunate Bereaved" by Brian Hodge.  The best treat in the whole goody bag.  I'll have more to say about this piece later this week.

As its subtitle heralds, Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre offers a variety of genre approaches to the October holiday.  The anthology furnishes ample proof that new tricks can be wrung from old tropes, so here's hoping that Guran (who bookends the contents with an entertaining intro and editor bio) continues to solicit groundbreaking stories and produces additional all-new Halloween ensembles in the coming autumns.