All Hallows

Golden’s (Road of Bones) latest horror novel features a wide cast of characters set against a nostalgic 1980s as evil comes to one street on Halloween. Parents and teenagers, men and women, in a suburban Massachusetts neighborhood, take turns providing the narration as the night’s partying and trick-or-treating ratchet up tensions in the community even further. However, the novel’s large cast brings more backstory to unpack, and drawing out the story’s supernatural elements runs the risk of blurring the characters together. Sorting out each lonely housewife or well-meaning husband dampens the novel’s intended domino effect between the conflicts that each member of the neighborhood brings with them. But the world that Golden paints also evokes a bygone time, with fond memories of The A-Team rerunsand X-Men comics fresh off the presses, plus a killer soundtrack.