All Hallows Eve; Stories of Halloween and Other Festivals of the Dead by Ellen Datlow

Book Review

Sarah Deeming

The nights are getting longer, and now is the time for horror and all things spooky. This is the second collection of short stories recently released from Titan Books and is based around Halloween and other festivals of the dead from all around the world by some of the greatest names in horror including Alma Katsu, Christopher Golden and Stephen Graham Jones, as well as introducing me to names that I hadn’t heard of before but who are now firmly on my radar.

There are some straight-up horror, like Siobhan Carroll’s bleak and miserable The Hungry Grass about a mysterious woman found injured in the road. The story combines the horror of the Irish Potato Famine with a strange exhaustion and lethargy that hits the English officer, George, trying to keep his section of Ireland fed. Filled with death and decay, this is an amazing combination of time and location with supernatural evil.  

Others are more subtle, like Treats by Clay Mcleod Chapman about a father being visited by the ghost of his son in the Halloween costumes he wore throughout his childhood. The tension and pain grows with each visitation, as does the father’s desperation to keep his son with him.

Christopher Golden’s Or So The Story Goes uses horror to subvert romantasy folklore about young women finding their fated love. It is survival horror at its best and is a strong argument for why he is an author we should all read more of and is different again from the others in the collection, which I felt was a strong positive in this collection.

Not every story worked for me, which is the nature of a short story anthology. There is something for everyone, but that doesn’t mean you’ll love every story because reading is a subjective thing. However, there is such a wide range of tales that there is bound to be something that will grab you. Also the way the book is organised means that no two similar stories are next to each other. If one doesn’t quite grab you, the next one is probably different enough that it will.

One standout entry for me was Merciless Feast by Linda D. Addison as it was a poem rather than a prose story. In the middle of the collection, it was completely different from the others, and the tale itself was fantastic about the sacrifice elders of a village make for their young ones on a night known as the Feast of Merciful Abundance.

All Hallow’s Eve is a creepy collection of horror from around the world from America to New Zealand, Ireland to Nigeria, giving us the reader a glimpse into how other cultures celebrate and fear their dead.