October Dreams:: A Celebration of Halloween

I'm only about 8 chapters into this book. If you're thinking about buying, here a some things to know:1) It's huge. It's a big, bulky, heavy book with a ton of stories, October memories, and more.2) Generally speaking, it alternates from story, to Halloween memory.3) Obviously, and not disappointingly, each chapter whether fiction or recollection leans heavily into the culture of Halloween.Like I say, I've not finished the book, but so far it's made a good impression. It's too subjective to say whether the stories are scary or not, but I will say that the mood and tone are what you'd hope for from a book that's mining deep into the Halloween vibe.

This dud should be titled "October Nightmare" because the quality of most of the stories is nightmarish rather than being anyone's "dream" book. It has a few good names - Bradbury, Poe - but Poe's selection is only a short poem, and Bradbury's is not his best. Most of the rest are supremely amateuristic. I give it two stars instead of one because the cover's surprisingly good.

This is a massive collection of stories about Halloween, along with the holiday recollections of the various contributing authors. If you are a member of the Halloween Is My Favorite Holiday Club then you would probably enjoy this book.

This is a celebration indeed. It's not a horror anthology; I can't say that a lot of it is even scary. More than half of the stories are essays of the author's memories of Halloween. I feel that this is as it should be. Halloween is a look backwards, before the disenchantment of the world. When there were still dark corners of the earth, where the unexplained still covered a wide variety of phenomena, before positivist materialism drew the colors out of life, leaving only gray. Halloween has both a dark and an exciting side, where the dead may rise to life and spirits of the dead may revel, but also where people can see and experience that something more than this world exists, that we are more than just ashes and dust and that life is has a purpose more than the 70-odd years we have. We love to be comfortably scared, and so we have one night a year where we allow ourselves to believe in phantoms and faeries, that we can feel "something that's just not right."That's why I like the memories better than the stories. Most people who write about Halloween write about things that scare themselves, things that they allow themselves to be afraid of once a year. For many people that's losing a child, or or a spouse, being confronted with an unbearable secret, or whatever lives underneath the bed at night. If you don't share the author's fears, or if frankly the fear is too personal for you, it is difficult to lose yourself in the story. Suprisingly, the memories were better. They were sort of a safe nostalgia, most of which involved some weird or supernatural occurrence. And we, the readers, can comfortably enjoy imagining being in the same circumstances. The memory essays were also better at evoking the mood of Halloween - the dry, crumbly leaves, the cool wind and crisp nights, the dark sky above and bonfires below, the good food at home as the harvest time begins.One of the agonies of modern man is that he has lost his sense of time. In the soulless cubicle, spring is summer is autumn is winter. The world turns, but he lacks any markers to delineate the passage of time. Without any means to measure his progress through time, he loses any sense of meaning for the here and now. We appreciate the present more when we build snowmen in winter, fly kites in the spring, eat ice-cream and catch fire-flies in the summer, and rake leaves in the fall. We need Halloween to keep faith with the past, to share feelings we normally repress with those who have gone before us. So happy Halloween, even if all you get is a bag of rocks!

So I just finished reading the book on 03 October 2013. I was really looking forward to this when I started reading, but sadly it fails to deliver anything that really stands out. For starters, you get more, "My Favorite Halloween Memory" by many authors than actual stories. And while that's nice that they want to share, that's not what I was looking for. I want the classics, ghosts, witches, pumpkins, goblins, etc, not just long drawn out no thrills. 2 stories that I think should be completely skipped is the piece on suggested movies to watch during Halloween and the next is suggested reading during Halloween. These are two topics that would be better suited to be researched online. And finally we come to one of the last stories in the book, a novella by Peter Straub. I've heard of him and have been told he's a great horror writer. Well, the tale, "Pork Pie Hat" is way too long and I'll just save you the time, it's very unexciting. Nothing scary at all happens. When I finished reading it, I was pissed. (Because it was that boring and to be so long? What the Hell?) It's a about a very old jazz musician being interviewed by a guy who enjoys his music. He goes on to tell how when he was 11 one Halloween night he witnessed some type of crime being committed in a very seedy location out in the woods. And it ends without really explaining anything or what was so shocking? It reads like a really bad crime drama. I came for horror, not John Grisham stories. Do yourself a favor if you're looking for good October/Halloween themed reading, skip this one.

I bought this book for a short story reading on Halloween night. I was very happy with the number of stories in this book. I also loved the various memories that are scattered throughout. Not only is it a great book to have for the Fall season but it's great for horror anthology lovers as well. Not only was I creeped out but I was also taken back to my youth and the wonderful mystery of my favorite holliday, Halloween! This book is a must have and I can't wait to read a few of the gems to my Halloween guests.

Delightful! Fantastic collection of private memories and short stories, the exception being the poorly-written anti-choice story by F. Paul Wilson titled BUCKETS. Aside from that abberation, almost every story in this is delightful. A must-have!

This great book of wonderful, old-fashioned adult Halloween tales is the exact same as "Halloween Horrors", which is a jacketed hardback available through the Amazon marketplace for much less!

Dieses Buch ist schon lange auf dem Markt und hat für mich Kultstatus. Eine der besten Horror-Anthologien überhaupt. Richard Chizmar ist nicht umsonst einer der erfolgreichsten Herausgeber in der Horror-Szene.Liebevoll ausgewählte Leckerbissen rund um die Halloween-Jahrezeit.Ein Muss für den Bücherschrank jedes Sammlers.