All Hallows
New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Christopher Golden is best known for his supernatural thrillers set in deadly, distant locales...but in this suburban Halloween drama, Golden brings the horror home.
It's Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unraveling. Up and down the street, secrets are being revealed, and all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified and beg the neighborhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man. There's a small clearing in the woods now that was never there before, and a blackthorn tree that doesn't belong at all. These odd children claim that The Cunning Man is coming for them...and they want the local kids to protect them. But with families falling apart and the neighborhood splintered by bitterness, who will save the children of Parmenter Road? All Hallows. The one night when everything is a mask...BUY THE BOOK
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Community Reviews
This book caught me off guard. It started out slowly and left me unprepared for the things that would happen later on. This seemed like a place where nothing bad could happen until suddenly they were. It is a story about what happens when you can't wear a mask to hide your secrets anymore and what happens when something sinister comes to prey on your worst fears.
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, so when I read the synopsis of All Hallows as a nostalgic 80s horror flick set on Halloween night in a small town, I was 100% in! Unfortunately All Hallows fell short for me in a lot of ways.
All Hallows is set in a small town on Halloween night and is told from multiple perspectives from different families in the town. I can see that this was meant to get the reader attached to these characters but unfortunately there were so many that I never felt intrigued or close to any of them. Half the book was all background info on these characters and what felt like unnecessary melodrama; like a cheating husband, a closeted teen, unrequited love, just too many little dramas thrown in that only succeeded in taking away from the main story, but we’re honestly boring.
Along with too many shallow characters, there was very little plot. The creatures aren’t really explained, and are easily defeated leaving you feeling robbed at the end of the book. I don’t know why these creatures are even in this town, where they come from, what made them, or why. And the Cunning Man, who is supposed to be scary, is just lame. There is no build up, there is no reveal, there is no attachments to the characters, and the nostalgia wasn’t even there for me! It didn’t feel like the 80s to me, this could have been set in any time period because there were no iconic 80s references.
All Hallows didn’t hit that Halloween nostalgia or spooky magic vibes in my opinion, and if you’re looking for a good spooky Halloween themed book I would recommend the Dark Harvest, or Autumncrow instead of this one.
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