You know what you need at the end of November and only 3 days away from Thanksgiving? You need me to tell you about a book that’s all about Halloween!

Ben Farthing, probably best known for his “I found horror” series, gave us a Halloween Advent Calendar this year in the form of The 31st Trick-or-Treater. It was set up so that if you started reading the book on October 1st, and read one chapter a day, you would finished it on Halloween night, which is also when the book concludes.

In it there is a small community who love and celebrate Halloween with great gusto. Then, 30 children disappear all at once on Halloween night.

A year passes, during which time our main character, Bob, never stops looking for his missing daughter. Then, just as suddenly as they disappeared, the children stat Reappearing, one child a night. The children, seeming to be 100% the same as they were the moment they disappeared a year ago, come back terrified and talking about a mysterious “31st Trick-or-treater” who will arrive on Halloween night.

While Bob waits nightly to see if his daughter will return, he still keeps looking for her around the town. Where he has not managed to find her for 365 days, but whatever floats your boat dude.

I hated Bob. HATED him. He looked own on all the other people in the community for “giving up” on the missing children, was absolutely self absorbed to the point of neglecting his wife and remaining children, and still had the audacity to complain that neighbors weren’t “neighborly” anymore.

Make it make sense my dude.

I did enjoy the book in the beginning enough that I accidentally read more than one chapter at a time and had to wait for the month to catch up with me. (When a story is good, chapter breaks cease to exist for me). There were some scenes that were definitely giving Stranger Things/Upside down vibes.

But the my interest fell off, and I had to catch up several chapters to reach the ending on Halloween.

The ending….

The ending couldn’t have fallen flatter for me if it had tried. I was left with a feeing of “That’s it?”

I ended up feeling generous with a 3 star rating.

I do recommend Ben Farthing, but not this book. The Twitching House and It Waits on the Top Floor were both good reads.