All Hallows by Christopher Golden

 

I am a genuine oddity among Horror fans, in that I really don't much like Hallowe'en. I am also an oddity in general in that I have approximately zero nostalgia for my teenage years, and I'm furthermore an oddity among Gen Xers in that I have like no nostalgia for the 1980s. So this novel about Hallowe'en, 1984, was always going to have an uphill battle. The fact it's not all that well-written--especially its weirdly gauzy anachronistic nostalgia for 1984, and its awkwardly miraculous knack for interrupting any narrative momentum to jump to a different POV (there were like six or seven, in the 97 pages I finished, and the chapters tended to be little three-to-five-page things)--eventually ground me to a halt. DNF, and probably just as well.