All Hallows' Eve

November 1, 2006
Gr 6 Up -A collection of 13 stories that will thrill and chill readers. Each tale takes place on Halloween, and some stories are variations on familiar tales. Many are set in upstate New York, which lends a nice Ichabod Crane feel to the book. Well crafted, these spine-tingling selections rely on gotcha moments and old-fashioned suspense rather than gross-out horror. While all of them are enjoyable and worth mulling over, several stand out: in the creepy Morgan Roehmars Boys, a girl acting the part of a knifing victim during a haunted hayride comes face to face with a long-dead child murderer. Pretending describes a first date gone horribly wrong. MARIAN features a teen driver who finds himself at the mercy of his car, and the horrifying My Real Mother describes an adopted teen who searches for her blood (and, as it turns out, blood-sucking) mother, while leaving behind a gruesome mess at her adoptive parents home. The writing is crisp and concise and truly packs a punch. Fans of horror fiction and suspense will not be disappointed.Elaine Baran Black, Gwinnett County Public Library, Lawrenceville, GA

Copyright 2006 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2006
Creepy and gruesome, these horror stories all take place on Halloween night when high-school characters bridge the gap between the living and the dead. "He opened the door, and a body fell out, a young woman with a bloody T-shirt and a knife sticking out of her back." Bodies are sawed into pieces and packed in plastic bags while a serial killer roams free. The grisly detail is sometimes funny, whether it's the threat to suck out a teen's brains through his eye sockets, or parents dressed as vampires offering their daughter's date a drink--A, B, or O-negative. The plots also have surprising twists and turns, with the trickster often outtricked. In a great story for readers' theater, two girls talk about their friendship in parallel narratives that present very different viewpoints of their relationship--which one will murder the other? Halloween fans too old for trick-or-treating will enjoy this, especially as a read-aloud. For more chilling tales, suggest Anthony Horowitz's" Horowitz Horror" (2006).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2007
In thirteen creepy tales, Vande Velde draws readers in with her conversational tone and familiar situations (meeting a date's parents, driving home from a party) before skillfully and swiftly shifting the narratives in unsettling, sometimes terrifying, directions. The mostly contemporary teenage characters not only balance the stories' menacing elements but also make the unexpected twists of fate that much more effective.

(Copyright 2007 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)