A review by crowyhead
October Dreams: A Celebration of Halloween by Robert Morrish, Richard T. Chizmar

3.0

This is a nicely atmospheric, if uneven, collection of Halloween-themed stories. There are some classics here, like "Heavy Set" by Ray Bradbury, and a lot of stories I hadn't read before. I think one of the reasons I ended up not being particularly thrilled with the collection is that it's HUGE and after a while the themes start to get really repetitive. I also was not a big fan of the "My Favorite Halloween Memory" sections, which were short essays from horror writers about Halloween. Some of them were really well written: funny, scary, or poignant by turns -- but I really wish the editor had given them some kind of guideline like, "Please don't mention how Halloween isn't what it used to be because of razor apple scares, etc." I swear, at least 75% of the essays mentioned this, and it started to really drive me crazy.

So I guess my overall take on this book is that it's a good seasonal collection, but you might want to space it out over the entire month of October, instead of reading it in a few days the way I did.