Trick-or-treat (Point Horror) vs. The old myers place (Halloween)

The first book that I read for this battle is Trick or Treat by Richie Tankersley Cusick (a Point Horror novel from 1989). Point Horror was Scholastic’s line of pulpy horror novels for young adults that ran from 1986 to 2005, peaking in popularity in the 1990s. Returning to my theory that I’ve only read books by about five authors, at least several of these books were written by authors of other beloved series: Point Horror helped to launch R. L. Stine’s career. At least two Baby-Sitter’s Club ghost writers published Point Horror novels, including Peter Lerangis (who much to my shock accepted my Facebook friend request) and Nola Thacker, true boss of pen names, who publishes under “D. E. Athkins” for her Point Horror books and “Tom B. Stone” for her middle grade series Graveyard School. Genius!

Anyway, back to this book, Trick or Treat. I fear that my aside about various other books and authors and the tangled webs they weave may reflect a fundamental reality: I did not enjoy this book and do not particularly feel like recapping it for you, so much so that I’d rather just talk about other books. I read the book a few years back, and I did not like it then. I thought maybe listening to it in audiobook form for this post might help. It did not. The situation was bad enough that prior to recapping, I chose to listen to a podcast episode on the book (Teen Creeps) to see if I was alone in a few of my questions: 1). Was this book somehow simultaneously unenjoyable and forgettable yet also deeply unnerving? 2). Is there a very uncomfortable sexual tension between step siblings in this book? 3). Was this book weirdly difficult to follow for a book written for teens? Great news! Within the first couple of minutes of the podcast episode, all of my suspicions were corroborated. The podcasters referred to the book as great for people who are interested in step-sibling porn and they noted that the book was confusing and forgettable. What a relief! (Kind of).

Back to what happens. Martha is grumpy because her father remarried and now she has to move to a creepy house with her stepbrother who she cannot stop thinking about (note: she describes him as annoying, but the preoccupation seems very thirsty in my read). The new house sucks; the vibes are very bad. Honestly everyone seems like a big weirdo but not in a fun way. Quite literally the first line of the book is: “Ok, how about this? Spirits in torment! Do they really come back to the scenes of their tragedies? Bound there forever, even in death?” These are Martha’s father’s musings about his idea for his next writing project, clearly a not-so-subtle foreshadowing of things to come. It doesn’t take too long for some of that to come to light. Someone at school explains that Martha’s new home was the site of a terrible murder (dun dun dun) almost exactly one year ago. Though the evidence is a little bit shoddy, and I don’t think the book depicts a flattering image of small town police work, the general understanding of what happens is that this jock dude, Dennis, became jealous that his ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth, had rejected him, so he murdered her in her bedroom and then committed suicide by jumping into a river (that said, they have never found Dennis’ body, which seems like a really important detail in a book such as this). Inconveniently, this murder happened in Martha’s new room, which is not helping her warm up to her new living arrangement. Fortunately, things perk up a bit when she meets this trio of three cousins: Wynn (BFF material), Blake (boyfriend material), and Greg (guidance counselor). The author keeps emphasizing how much Blake and Greg look alike, which I thought would surely have some plot relevance like a swaparoo situation or something but absolutely not). Someone starts pulling pranks on Martha: Creepy phone calls, a scarecrow with an ax through it’s head hanging out her window, rustling sounds in her bedroom. Martha is a real sad sack, but this is all pretty unnerving. These things keep escalating, and of course the parents leave town, because who wouldn’t move your kids (who hardly know each other yet are “irresistibly drawn” to each other) into a new town and then book it for a writing retreat/honeymoon? Martha’s romance with Blake continues to escalate (despite the electric tension with her step-brother) and her friendship is really blossoming with Wynn. Unfortunately, a real barrier to that friendship is that Wynn had previously been BFF’s with Elizabeth (the girl who was murdered in Martha’s room) and had been the one who found her body the night she was murdered. She can’t remember anything from that night due to traumatic amnesia, but it’s definitely impacting the vibe of any potential slumber parties. Of course things get real wild the night of the Halloween Dance (where all three cousins are wearing nearly identical Halloween costumes, because why not?), and Martha rushes home following a threatening phone call that she receives at the dance, certain that her beloved step-brother, who is home with the flu, is in immediate danger. Concerned, Martha and the trinity of similarly cloaked cousins hop into the car to find out what is going on. I’ve now consulted three separate accounts that all suggest that the next bit is incredibly confusing. Key points and spoiler city: Somehow the gang, real Scooby-Doo style, end up in sequence of tunnels under the house that of course connect the murder bedroom™ to a mausoleum. They find Dennis’ decaying body laying out in some sort of altar. And then some cloaked murderer who ends up being Wynn (seriously, I figured that the Greg and Blake being almost identical would have a payoff here, but it did not; that was actually a fairly successful misdirection) stabs the influenza-addled stepbrother. Fortunately, the twin cousins stop and restrain her. Next, we learn through a classic villain monologue: Wynn had been madly in love with Dennis. Last year on Halloween night, she knew that Dennis was going to try to get back with together Elizabeth, and she had to stop it from happening! Obviously the only solution was to murder Elizabeth (what happened to just starting nasty rumors?). Unfortunately, in all the action she also accidentally killed Dennis (Oops!). She staged the scene, including driving Dennis’ car out to the water to make it look like a murder-suicide (it really does seem as though no forensic work was done on these crime scenes). Somehow, she got the body down to her creepy worship altar, where she now pretends that she and Dennis’ decaying corpse are madly in love with each other. Fortunately, the book ends happily with Martha and Blake kissing as the deranged cousin is carted away and the stepbrother is taken to the hospital (and, I kid you not, Martha thinks about her stepbrother throughout the entire end-scene kiss).

This book had so many elements that could have made for a good story: Creepy old house with en suite cemetery. Underground network of tunnels. Corpse in mausoleum. One major relief was that Guidance Counselor Greg was kind throughout the book, and that gave me ample concern that he was going to end up as either a murderer or sexual predator (particularly given his weird resemblance to the main character’s love interest and bold decision to wear a grim reaper cloak and carry a real ax to a Halloween party that had, only one year prior, ended in a murder). While he didn’t seem to be a particularly effective guidance counselor (and I would strongly encourage him to re-evaluate that grim reaper costume decision), it was nice to just see someone trying to be a good guy in one of these books. Despite the promising elements, this book just left me feeling icky and confused.

In a quest to find another book featuring a girl moving into a new house to discover that a murder has happened in her bedroom at Halloween, I stumbled upon Halloween: The Old Myers Place (1997) by Kelly O’Rourke (which is part of a series of novelizations connected to—but not fully consistent with—the Halloween movies). This whole book series is exceedingly rare, and if I had wanted to buy this book, I was looking at shelling out $400. I was not that committed, so I listened to a YouTube video where are cartoon wolf named “Doctor Wolfula” (an entity that really complicates the vampires vs. werewolves debate) read the book aloud in a profoundly grating fake voice which became all the more grating when he attempted to perform the voices of teen girls (even so, thank you for your service, internet wolf dude, without you this review would not be possible). Listening was a labor of love, but eventually I got pulled into the story enough to distract from the distressing voice work (but again, thanks, wolf!).

Mary has just moved from Los Angeles to a small town in Illinois so that her parents can get their big break doing some real estate development thing for the new shopping mall (very cool!). Everyone in this book sucks, including Mary, and we spend much of the beginning of the book learning how spectacularly vapid she is. Great news for Mary, she’s from a big city, so she automatically falls in with a cool crowd, secretly leaving her old goth/punk/drug dealing(?) ways behind her to fit in in this new place. There’s some B-plot stuff related to her goth weirdo cousin named Julifer, but it really isn’t all that mission critical. (Julifer may be the only character in this book that doesn’t suck, and near as I can tell, you could cut her character from the story and almost nothing about the book would change). Mary’s house is creepy and weird, and then it is revealed to her by someone at school that she lives in Michael Myers’ old house, sleeping in the very same room where he killed his sister a quarter century ago. That sucks! Even worse news, he’s come back to town a few times since then (most recently last year, so it’s not like we are talking ancient history), consistently leaving a trail of bodies behind, and (worst part for Mary, IMO) he ALWAYS returns to his old house. So, I am someone who would buy a house that is believed to be haunted, but that tiny shred of survival instinct that dwells within me tells me to not move into a house where an uncatchable serial killer repeatedly visits when he is on his murderous sprees. It just seems like a high risk behavior. Mary’s parents lead with how busy they will be with this mall stuff, so they will hardly be around. I understand that balancing parenthood and careers is difficult, but I might not make a series of choices that result in my teen daughter being regularly home alone in a high-risk murder house when she is a particularly high-risk demographic for said murderer. I just have to believe that there’s a better solution. We’ve had a string of problematic real estate developers working on malls in this blog; typically the concerns are more economic in nature, but I daresay that ditching your daughter in a murder house to work on the mall is, in fact, problematic real estate developer behavior. Not so shockingly, Mary gets attacked in the house. When the cops arrive, they find her ex-boyfriend unconscious on the floor. Now, they go on to explain this timeline, but I was surprised that Mary had lived in this place long enough to have an ex-boyfriend there (remember, less than a year ago, murders were happening in this house). Oh, young love! He gets blamed for the attack, though I think even at this point it is pretty clear that he is not the culprit. Ex-BF (Jeff) claims that he was only in the house to warn Mary about the new guy she’s dating (Josh). I believe Jeff (though Jeff also sucks). I wonder who the attacker could possibly be!?!?. Lots of teen antics ensue. Probably my favorite part is when they sneak into the mall because Mary knows of an unsecured entrance and they need somewhere to drink beer (this is what happens when you kinda ditch your daughter in a murder house for your fancy mall job). I actually really enjoyed the time the teens spent in the mall at nighttime. The mall has this indoor tree house thing that sounds pretty cool (great idea, Mom and Dad!). Too bad the night ends in murder! Bummer! Still… who could the murderer possibly be??? There’s some more love triangle business between Mary, her ex, and the new guy, Josh. Josh sucks… a lot (way more than Jeff sucks). Josh’s friends also suck a lot. This takes up a ton of the book but really didn’t have to. More murder happens in a graveyard (at this point, most of Mary’s popular friends have been murdered; they also generally sucked). Jeff finds the bodies and alerts the authorities. By the time the cops get to the crime scene, the bodies are gone. The cops blame Jeff for something; it’s a little hard to know what exactly they blame him for since there are no bodies (the cops suck a lot, too). The cops find Jeff’s bloody coat at the non-murder murder scene. Not great! Jeff senses that Mary is in danger and flees the cops to rescue her (I would say there is something psychic about this premonition, but like he did leave her in a famous murder house). Good thing he went back for her because (Spoiler) Michael Myers is trying his darndest to do Mary in. A fairly suspenseful battle takes place in the crawl space beneath the house, with Mary whacking Michael Myers pretty good with a wooden board with a nail in it and then Jeff impaling him with a rusty pipe. As Michael Myers pulls the pipe from his chest, he bumps the gas line and the house explodes. Jeff and Mary make it out to rekindle their teen lust, and theoretically, Michael Myers dies in the explosion. That said, given that there is another book in the series, my gut tells me that he’s not really dead.

There’s really no one to root for in this book, except maybe Julifer. There’s a scene where she slashes all the jocks’ tires after they really, really suck, and that is the only moment where I felt truly good about someone’s actions. Mary is vapid and has no real personality traits in the book (though sounds like she was probably much more interesting during her vaguely alluded to goth/punk/drug dealer(?) days in L.A). The only time I like her is when she stands up for Julifer, enabling Julifer to get away from the jocks and slash their tires #SlashQueen). Jeff does a truly wild amount of heroic stuff, so I want to root for him, but he displays such concerning anger and jealousy toward Mary at the beginning of the book that I cannot really celebrate him until he’s accessed a lot of therapy and engages in deep introspection about how to manage the difficult emotions that can come up when you are a kid from a poor family pining after an elite mall heiress from L.A. The parents, again, are disturbingly missing for having moved into an incredibly famous murder house (hell, I’ve heard of their murder house, and I have never seen any of the Halloween movies). Lastly, pretty much every other man in this book is incredibly violent in ways I don’t feel like describing here. I don’t approve of Michael Myers’ actions, but I do understand why someone would hate this godforsaken town.

As noted above, both books feature a girl moving into a new house to find that a murder has happened in her bedroom at Halloween. The similarities really run deeper than that, though. Both books feature a deeply unlikeable girl moving into a new house to find that a murder has happened in her bedroom at Halloween. Both books feature a fair amount of meandering through cemeteries and dead body/ies from the protagonists’ broader peer group being discovered underground proximate to the aforementioned murder house. Both books seem to have a supernatural element though it is never explicitly named as such (in ToT, the stepbrother is mysteriously drawn to the Mausoleum, and in Halloween, Michael Myers pulls a pipe out of his chest; since I’ve not seen the movie, I don’t know if there is a backstory that explains such a cavalier response to his impalement). Both books feature incredibly unhelpful cops. Heck, both protagonists even wear the same problematic (though normative at the time) Halloween costume! In my mind, the biggest difference is in the side characters. In general, I found most of the side characters in ToT to be fairly likable, whereas pretty much everyone in Halloween town (not THAT Halloweentown) is a friggin’ monster. I guess the other big difference is that I generally understood what was going on in the Halloween book, even though I often wished it wasn’t. Somehow, despite all that happens in ToT, I found it weirdly boring. Halloween is terribly written and everyone is despicable, but it kept my attention far better. I have to believe that both books’ editors were on vacation during the publication period (Halloween is probably a busy time for folks in the YA pulp horror industry ::shrug::).

Showdown Winner: Halloween: The Old Myers Place, though this was a real race to the bottom, which is a real shame for two books that conceptually have so much potential. Maybe the true hero in all of this is the internet cartoon wolf who made it all possible.