Review: October, by Gregory Bastianelli

Description

In 1970, four boys on the cusp of becoming teenagers notice strange events occurring in Maplewood, NH, timed with the late-night arrival of an old magician who has taken up residence in a boarding house in their neighbourhood where one of the tenants is a reclusive pulp horror writer. The writer’s fears have kept him from venturing outside in over forty years, fears linked to the magician’s previous visit. As children go missing in town, the four boys try to piece together seemingly unrelated phenomena and realize dark forces are at work, but no one will believe them.

My Review

Thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and to Flame Tree Press for sending me a copy of this book. Anne does tours for two of my three favourite publishers – Orenda and Flame Tree. My other favourite, Angry Robot, organise their own tours. You’ll notice, two of those are spec fic publishers and one does crime fiction. Yep, that’s pretty much my reading these days. Crime and spec fic. Sometimes I find a book that has both!

But that’s a tangent we shall discuss another day. On to the review!

A group of young boys, on the edge of adolescence realise something very odd is going on in their town when people start disappearing and strange people appear. The main characters, four 12 year old boys, are all dealing with their own traumas, and the adults don’t seem to want to believe what’s happening. Except, a reclusive horror writer and an old carnival magician. In the 1920s they both did impossible things, and almost fifty years later it’s returned to haunt them.

Small town New England in 1970 is a quiet, conventional place. Nothing interesting ever happens in Maplewood. The main characters are middle class so when two of them go missing people react. Before they do, however, two boys for poorer families disappear, but everyone assumes they’re runaways so nothing happens. Through the month of October, various characters find that things aren’t what they seem and monsters use the imagination to attack the town. It all culminates on Halloween, when the four boys, a big brother, and an old magician attack a shrieking ghost, burnt children and an ageless boy in an old funeral home.

I got quite into this book. It reminded me of a film, probably one I’ve never seen; it would make a good series or film. The quiet setting, the strange arrival, the strange events that follow, the red herring, followed by more horrible events, and then finally the showdown. The plot follows the pattern we expect, but the execution is not at all what you’d expect. There’s the supernatural element, the folk horror traditions of pumpkins and scarecrows, and then the small town coming of age story. It all works so well together.

The child characters are realistic. That mix of childish excitement at Halloween and the adolescent burgeoning attractions, watching older children and siblings get to do things they’re far too young to actually understand. The sense of adventure as they head off on a long bike ride, to find a forgotten fair, or an ancient graveyard, or climbing trees to jump in a pile of leaves, challenged by their parents’ fears about abduction and being safe playing out at night.

The adults range from terrifying to grotesque to caring and supportive. And there’s the dirty old men in the library. Because even in quiet small towns, there’s a dirty old man, who might not be that old, and everyone knows who it is but they keep quiet. There are secrets in every house, and the observers in the community keep their secrets. Adults in the book are shown to take notice of abductions and keep their kids home, but nobody warns the children about flashers or who they should ask for help if they get attacked, no-one tells them about puberty, keeping books on the subject in the adults’ rather than children’s section, even when it’s a book for children, or helps them deal with death. So, pretty realistic for late 20th century attitudes.

I enjoyed the structure of the novel, taking the reader through events day by day from multiple perspectives. We see the thoughts and emotions of the characters as they deal with their lives, and the sudden eruption of weirdness around them, while learning about their stories from multiple perspectives.

I don’t know what particular sub-genre of horror this is, maybe folk horror, or supernatural horror, or suburban horror? The tone is ‘Hallmark movie’ right up until people start disappearing, dying, and dangling from trees. The past haunts the present to get revenge. It’s a fun book, honestly, and I think I enjoyed it more than the short story collection I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. The horror was in the tone, in the incongruity between a small town enjoying harvest festivals and children disappearing, chased by scarecrows, and not in gore.

Although a couple of people go bobbing for apples in an acid vat…

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About the author

Gregory Bastianelli is the author of the novels “Shadow Flicker,” “Snowball,” “Loonies,” and “Jokers Club.”

His works have been lauded by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Rue Morgue magazine and Horrornews.net, which described Bastianelli as the “messiah of macabre.”

He is a member of the Horror Writers Association.

He lives in Dover, NH.

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FLAME TREE PRESS
FLAME TREE PRESS is the imprint of long-standing independent Flame
Tree Publishing, dedicated to fu l-length original fiction in the horror and
suspense, science fiction & fantasy, and crime / mystery / thriller categories. The list brings together fantastic new authors and the more established; the award winners, and exciting, original voices