If you’re like me, reading creepy horror novels in the weeks leading up to Halloween is a seasonal necessity – like going apple picking, carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns, and crucifying scarecrows on the front lamppost.
There are a handful of new releases this October that are on my “must read” list – David Bell’s Cemetery Girl, Dead of Night by Jonathan Maberry, the Harper Perennial reissue of Ray Bradbury’s classic collection The October Country, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Harbor, and the new zombie anthology from Night Shade Books – but my first read of the Halloween season had to John Everson’s The Pumpkin Man.
Set in the sleepy northern California town of River’s End, Everson’s latest offering is cool fusion of urban legend, druidism, black witchcraft and mainstream horror. Still struggling to come to grips with the gruesome murder of her father, Chicagoan Jennica Murphy is faced with more bad news: because of financial cuts, she loses her job as a parochial teacher and finds out that her and her roommate, teacher Kirstin Rizzo, are facing imminent eviction from their apartment. With no other options readily available, the two newly unemployed teachers decide to take a “vacation” to the West Coast and investigate an old ancestral house that Jenn recently inherited when her father died. The house used to belong to her aunt Meredith before she passed away and taking a trip to the scenic environs of northern California seemed like a good idea…
But what Jenn doesn’t realize is that her aunt was a witch vilified by her neighbors – and her late uncle George was a pariah who was murdered by a group of townspeople decades earlier who believed that he was the infamous Pumpkin Man who murdered children and replaced their heads with pumpkins carved to look exactly like them.
As the two women explore the bizarre house – desiccated bats are nailed to doors, human skulls are hidden in kitchen drawers, the basement contains shelves upon shelves of gruesome canned oddities – they find a Ouija board hidden in a recess in the fireplace. Curious, they try to summon the spirit of Jenn’s father – and inadvertently waken something as evil as it is ancient….
The Pumpkin Man is back – and carving up more than just innocent kids. With the supernatural killer closing in, Jenn turns to her dead aunt’s dark library for answers…
The reason I enjoy reading Everson (Siren, Sacrifice) so much is because he can make a nightmare-inducing, bladder-loosening story palatable for mainstream readers. I know more than a few genre fiction fans who stay away from most horror releases because of the over-the-top violence and gratuitous gore. But even though Everson’s stories are undeniably bloody, he weaves it into the narrative so that it fits – it’s not so much the violence that is scary; it’s the dark story behind it…
The Pumpkin Man is a perfect Halloween read if there ever was one. I loved how Everson tied both urban legend and arcane mythology into the gourd-powered storyline. Here are a few excerpts:
• “The legend says that the Pumpkin Man comes to River’s End every Halloween and chooses a person. When he decides on his victim, he picks himself a pumpkin from the local patch and uses a knife and magic to carve that person’s soul into the gourd… He draws the face of the victim on the pumpkin with his knife, and by the time he’s through, there’s an image of the person in the gourd and a headless body left behind.”
• “…other cultures celebrated the pumpkin as a soul cage. The gourd’s wealth of seeds was seen as a powerful lure to spirits, and so a shaman would carve out the top of a pumpkin, performing a ceremony to invoke the spirits of elders. When just such a spirit had entered the pumpkin, he would close the lid to trap it there. In this way, he would be able to hold a spirit for days or weeks, until the flesh of the pumpkin at last decomposed… Variants of this ceremony involve the entrapment of serpents or the use of a human skull, the latter being placed within the pumpkin in order to give flesh and voice once more to the dead.”
Do you want to get your spook on this Halloween? Read The Pumpkin Man – I’ll guarantee you that you’ll never look at pumpkin carving the same way again…
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for the last two decades and has written thousands of reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, and BarnesandNoble.com. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
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