Meet Audrey Snowden Audrey Snowden Review count: 50 From her oeuvre: Bob Powers’s Happy Cruelty Day! David J. Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween Jim Belushi’s Real Men Don’t Apologize!

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Humor and literature reviewer Audrey Snowden, a children’s librarian at a branch of the Cleveland Public Library, is a broad-minded reviewer who’s covered, as she says, "everything from bathroom readers to a book on the history of copyright." She returned to her Buckeye roots to get back into ice-skating after spending a year as the director of a school library a few hours from Mexico City. She says, "The job interview was wonderful. All the interviewers gathered in a conference room in Ohio, and I, in my little Mexican apartment, with bare feet and shorts on, put them on speakerphone." Also a senior writer and copy editor for International Figure Skating, she wants to be "a hybrid of Jennifer Crusie, Anne Fadiman, and Mary Roach" when she "grows up." She also currently enjoys documenting her two-year-old son’s development. "His name is Jeremiah, but I started calling him Pudlie a long time ago, and unfortunately for him, that’s the name that stuck. He has the most wonderful laugh." Her home's "friendly year-round creepy guy prop," Graves the Ghastly Butler (see picture, left), works as the family’s guard dog. He used to make Pudlie uneasy and give Audrey frights in the middle of the night, but now they’re mostly used to him. She says, "It’s fun to see people’s reactions to him, in a sadistic sort of way. They usually ask about him, listen politely, and steal furtive glances at him the entire time they’re in the dining room, where he lives." If you didn’t guess, she deems Halloween the "ultimate awesome holiday [because] Christmas can be cloying; Halloween can be gleefully morbid…. It flirts with danger. All that stuff you know is not real (but wish you had evidence for, like ghosts or vampires)…on Halloween, it might be."