Fiction Reviews
October
(2024) Gregory Bastianelli, Flame Tree Press,
£12.95 / Can$21.95 / US$16.95, trdpbk, 376pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58923-0
An aged magician arrives in a small New England town in 1970 to recreate a magic trick that had tragic results years prior. When he accidentally opens a doorway to sinister evil just in time for the Halloween season, four boys on the cusp of becoming teenagers and a reclusive horror writer attempt to save the town from unimaginable horrors.
True confession time, I hadn’t read any of Gregory Bastianelli’s previous work until I read his novel Snowball concerning a group of travellers who get trapped by a blizzard at Christmas. Sadly, for them, there are worse things lurking beyond the driving snow and it soon becomes apparent that those who are stranded are connected and caught in a bigger, deadlier game. Bastianelli could clearly write, and Snowballexhibited a great imagination and narrative flare. That might have been enough to attract me to October, but no it wasn’t that exactly. What did attract me was the description of the novel and the main characters: an old magician, a reclusive pulp horror writer and four boys who are about to become teenagers. I immediately thought of the works of Ray Bradbury, and those big horror novels I used to love reading by the likes of Stephen King, Peter Straub and Robert McCammon. Therefore it comes as no surprise that in the acknowledgements section after the novel Bradbury, King, and Straub get a mention along with the likes of Poe, Stoker, Lovecraft, Mathieson and Campbell. Clearly we are in safe hands here, hold on tight!
What follows is a 373-page long novel divided into each day in October, with each day further divided into different sub-sections. Some chapters are very short, made up of only one sub-section, but other are longer until we get to the last day of the month, Halloween, which is almost 60 pages long divided into 14 sections. So open the book at October 1st and visit Maplewood, New Hampshire in 1970 where four boys have noticed the arrival of an old magician who funnily enough is staying in a boarding house where an old, pulp horror writer lives, someone who is too scared to go outside, perhaps with good reason as strange things start to happen around town. These strange things include children going missing, mysterious sightings, mysterious warnings, and odd people arriving in the town, and much more. The boys know that something strange is going on, but no-one wants to believe them, no-one except the old magician and the reclusive horror writer, but are two old men and four young boys enough to stop the darkness spreading over the town?
Bastianelli has delivered his own love-letter to Halloween and more than a nod to the writers he loved to read. It’s a shame that Robert McCammon isn’t listed in his favourites as McCammon’s Boy’s Life springs to mind here, as does King’s IT, Straub’s Shadowland and Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Bastianelli has combined a love of those meaty horror novels of the 1980s, the Halloween season, small town America and the everyday “stuff” of boy’s lives into a heady brew chronicling strange goings which build in intensity and turn the novel into something that is more than autumn and Halloween and streets lined with piles of autumn leaves, or flickering pumpkins sitting in windows or doorsteps, or even children dressing up. In many ways October is like King’s Salem’s Lot. There is oddness, there is strangeness, there is nastiness, but what is actually happening? Then it clicks into place, with a revelation taking events into a dark and bloodier place while leaving the reader holding on like grim death. I think horror readers, like me, of a certain age, are going to love this, and hats off to Flame Tree again for bringing great books by horror writers from around the world to the attention of UK readers… Keep up the good work!
Ian Hunter
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