I look at Al Sarrantonio’s “Orangefield” series like a pumpkin patch: Pick one – any one – and you’re bound to walk away pleased. It’s just that some are a little juicier on the inside than others.

Such is the case with the third and latest, HALLOWEENLAND. By no means is it bad or even disappointing; it’s just not as good as its predecessors. Perhaps its rather episodic structure has something to do with it. One almost can carve the novel into separate pieces and have several standalone novellas – but more on that later.

HALLOWEENLAND opens with Jack and Marianne Carlin in bed, makin’ a baby at 1 a.m. But how can that be, embattled Detective Bill Grant wonders, when Jack was killed just minutes before that hour? Maybe, he posits, she was “visited” by someone else? Several names of town ne’er-do-wells are floated.

Nonsense, Marianne says. But she never counted on being impregnated – one way or the other – by Samhain, the Lord of the Dead, who needs a child to carry out his supernaturally nefarious purposes.

Without giving away how all that plays out in part one, subsequent pieces deal with a squirrelly fellow named Dickens opening a freaky theme park in Orangefield, and Grant traveling to Ireland to come face to face with Samhain. They converge, but each practically can be seen as their own, kind of like how HORRORWEEN was comprised of a number of previously written Orangefield stories, loosely – but credibly – threaded together into a whole.

Grant is the continuing presence among all, while Samhain and others dip in and out. He’s a likable guy – sympathetic, even, as his entire life crumbles around him, and investigating this matter seems to be all he has to live for. Good thing Orangefield must be the most volatile small town on the planet, because Sarrantonio keeps thinking of crazy-ass situations to throw at its residents, and as a fan of the series, that’s just the way I like it. Here’s hoping the townsfolk never catch on and thus, stay put, ensuring the series continues.

Like other recent novels from the Leisure Horror line, HALLOWEENLAND comes with value-added bonus material, promoted on the back cover as a novella titled THE BABY. But don’t get too excited. At 80 pages or so, it’s merely the first chunk of HALLOWEENLAND with slight variations here and there, most notably with a different, rougher ending. If it were a DVD, it’d be labeled an alternate scene, except those generally aren’t feature-length. So while that may be a letdown, the main goods remain ripe for harvest. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• FLIGHTS: EXTREME VISIONS OF FANTASY edited by Al Sarrantonio
• HALLOWS EVE by Al Sarrantonio
• HORRORWEEN by Al Sarrantonio
• 999: TWENTY-NINE ORIGINAL TALES OF HORROR AND SUPSENSE edited by Al Sarrantonio