Horrorween Horror Book Review

I picked this one out my tbr pile back in October because it seemed to be geared towards Halloween. From the back blurb it appeared to be a spooky tale about a town plagued by the “Lord of Death” and creepy pumpkins. What it really was, however, was a hastily slapped together book containing three loosely related novellas (all of which had been printed elsewhere) which would’ve been fine if I were looking to read a collection of ho-hum poorly researched novellas but I wasn’t.


I made it through the first story which I had a nagging feeling I’d read before. It was about a writer suffering through writer’s block, a marriage that is falling apart and . . . bees. The ending drove me nuts as I saw it miles away and wondered why the protagonist never realized it. The author throws in his version of Samhain, whom he calls “The Lord of Death” and calls “Sam”. Apparently, “Sam” is terrorizing the small town where the nasty bees and the not-so-bright writer live. Anyone with just a passing bit of knowledge about the celtic holiday Samhain will know that it is pronounced “Sow-en” not “Sam hain” so I pretty quickly lost all interest in this book. If you’re going to write a book with a twist on a celtic holiday at least do the basic research and get the pronunciation correct, sheesh. But then I guess it would’ve been quite silly to go around calling your big scary evil villain “Sow”. It didn’t help that this story was extremely average and the follow up bored me so much that I couldn’t get through it.