#Titanuary ‘Halloween’ by John Passarella

About the book…

In 1978, Laurie Strode survived an encounter with Michael Myers, a masked figure who killed her friends and terrorized the town of Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night. Myers was later gunned down, apprehended and committed to Smith’s Grove State Hospital.

For forty years, memories of that nightmarish ordeal have haunted Laurie and now Myers is back once again on Halloween, having escaped a routine transfer, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.

This time, Laurie is prepared with years of survival training to protect herself, her daughter Karen and her granddaughter Allyson, a teenager separated from her family and enjoying Halloween festivities.

‘Halloween’ is the novelisation of the first in a new trilogy of movies , starring original scream queen, Jamie Lee Curtis and directed by David Gordon Green.

It is difficult, nay impossible, one might think, to take characters so deeply embedded in the zeitgeist, and reboot them in both book and film format, whilst paying homage to the unforgettable characters which defined an era in horror history.

To my mind, both David Gordon Green and John Passarella do this with aplomb, the take the story that you think you know, the characters like Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, and creat something both instanteously classic and yet very modern in tone.

It is not a word for word adaptation of a screenplay, this is true storytelling and I think, as with other novelisations which titan publish , they recreate the feeling of watching a movie again, but with added extras that add pathos and intensity to the storyline.

The story takes place in Haddonfield, where the local, and national, boogeyman, Michael Myers , is to be incarcerated, permanently, in the ominously named, Glass Hill (a throwaway connection to the whole ‘glass houses… ‘ saying, perhaps?)

Except he never gets there, and the nightmare which has been contained since the 1970’s babysitter murders, is once more on the prowl, your worst nightmare come to life-unstoppable, unnegotiable and single minded in his focus to get back to his sister, Laurie, the solo survivor of his campaign of terror.

You can only begin to imagine the kind of evil, the malignancy which can still fester after 40 solid years of being in prison…and the killing scenes reflect this frenzied, often funny, attacks, on both random and directed victims alike.

The classic is the classic is the classic, however, this book stands on its own merits, like a Myers-lite kid brother,, maybe with a smaller kitchen knife rather than a psycho sized one…

Whatever the analogy which you would care to make, journeying back to Haddonfield with the impecable narrative style of Emily Sutton-Smith is time well spent, especially echoing John’s dedication to his wife’s favourite holiday and favourite movie !

And it is currently available as one of the Audible Prime books, so if you have an Audible membership, then you can listen to this for free.

About the author…