All Hallows Eve Analysis
“All Hallows Eve” is a fictional novel by Vivian Vande Velde. With the genre based on horror, this book is a series of thirteen short stories assembled together to form a perfect scary book. Though it may not seem scary during the daytime, this book is sure to chill you to the bone when you read it alone on the night of Halloween. Describing witches, zombies, vampires, and werewolves, this novel is great to read to get into the Halloween spirit!
Starting off with the intro story “Come in and Rest a Spell,” this story has a catchy beginning and end. The stories in this novel all deal with events and scary experiences occurring on Halloween- the night where it’s said that gruesome spirits come back to haunt people on Earth for just one night. While some stories describe haunted farms with murderous spirits running loose, others tell the story of pranks that lead to discovering horrible secrets and field trips to cemeteries where bodies seem to move.
And as more and more stories are read, readers find this novel also describes deceased and lost spirits that come back every Halloween, and a fortune teller that tells five friends terrible fates waiting for them. There is also the story of a friendship that, though it seemed real, ended up with one friend killing the other and a story on family that resulted in finding out the terrible truth behind the costumes. And as previously mentioned, it’s also about witches casting wicked spells; and zombies, vampires, and werewolves terrorizing all on the night of Hallows Eve.
One story in this novel that I especially found interesting was about a girl who lived out in the countryside and it was Halloween night. Ashley was a 16-year-old girl, and she was fixing up a murder scene in a barn. Every year the Cristanis Family Farm would hire kids to decorate the farm for Halloween and have drive-ins of tractors from neighboring farms to see the scary show. Of course tractors had to pay to get in and that’s the main reason why the owner of the farm held this event.
But another reason why all the other farms had urged for the Cristanis Family Farm to serve as the Halloween drive-in barn was because of the haunted background of the farm. Before the Cristanis family had bought the farm, the place was originally owned by Morgan Roehmar- a so called serial killer who was not only found to have killed about a half dozen boys but girls also. But the scary thing is that the police never found the body of Roehmar himself. It was rumored that Roehmar killed himself after his girlfriend betrayed him and told the police of the horrible smell of the dead bodies in his barn.
Soon the farm was rumored as haunted after Roehmar had died and it stayed empty for centuries until the Cristanis family bought it. But now as Ashley is setting up the barn, a sound comes from one of the corners of the huge barn and soon the lights flash out. What seems so harmless a ghost comes up to her and chokes Ashley to death. This book was scary to read at night, when you’re alone, and I think it serves as a good book to read for Halloween. Though it definitely was not the scariest book I’ve read, it keeps you scared for the moment while reading it.
The stories were original and some were really scary like the story I’ve mentioned above, and it was a good read. Though I’ve never really realized it till now- one of my favorite genres when reading books is horror. I like the usual scary book and especially scary movie to read and watch at night. Though I didn’t read this book on the night of Halloween- but the night before Halloween, it still was fun to read and I recommend it to readers of all ages to read the night on/before Halloween.
Though this book was scary at some parts, I think the author could’ve done a better job writing some of the stories like the one about a 15-year-old girl who looks for her real parents. The short story is titled “My Real Mother” and it’s about a girl named Evelyn who is an adopted girl that has always wondered on finding her adopted parents, like all adopted children do, and Evelyn finds her parent’s address by using the adoption papers and the internet.
But when she arrives to her parents’ house on Halloween night dressed up as a princess, things go wrong after she tells her parents that she’s their daughter. The parents, it turns out, are vampires, that can’t use her blood since she’s related and they kick her back out of their house and Evelyn has to go back home. It takes a series of only five minutes for the encounter between Evelyn and her parents to happen and I just think the author could’ve done more to the scene, or at least have made it scarier than it seemed. But this novel was still good to read and it was okay.
