Pop quiz…WHAT IS THE MEANING OF HALLOWEEN???? Can it be expressed…in POETRY????
Beneath sky pitch-black and moon full bright
Lurks terror twice as dark as night.
Newly risen from the grave,
Hot, fresh red blood it does crave.
Grisly death it brings the brave;
the cowardly will rant and rave,
Halloween is a time for fright,
But madness stalks the gloom of...
PRANK NIGHT
Well, it's no Vincent Price doing the Thriller poem but then again author David Robbins is no poet. Mostly the author of Westerns and men's adventure fiction, Robbins wrote around 300 books as Don Pendleton, Jon Sharpe, and Ralph Compton, among others, but mixed in there with all those post-apocalyptic survival stories and mountain man westerns are seven horror novels, and in PRANK NIGHT (1994) he reveals to us the secret history of Halloween, which turns out to have a lot more to do with brain-eating and Predator than you might have expected.
Since it kicks off with a quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar you kind of think this is going to be some high-minded stuff, but almost immediately a super-bad dad is getting eaten by a monster he thinks is a bear but only if that bear recently ate David Robbins and he's still caught in its throat reciting bad poetry like, "The feast! The sweet feast! After all this time! The nectar will be mine!" Because not only does the monster in this book love sucking out brains, it also communicates its thoughts telepathically pretty much nonstop. Talk about adding injury to insult. The bad dad having to listen to this bad beat stream of consciousness poetry is Horace Walker, a beer-swilling high school dropout who hates books, comic books, and reading, but he likes beating his kid with a belt. Essentially, he’s the kind of blue collar troglodyte Stephen King made the bad guy in books like 'Salem's Lot only instead of hailing from Maine, Horace lives in a small Oregon town known as Cemetery Ridge and after that Prologue you realize that this isn't the only thing Robbins cribbed from Stephen King.
In an opening right out of 'Salem's Lot the book picks up with Benjamin J. Shields, writer, heading home to Cemetery Ridge, OR after an 8-year absence, kind of like the way writer Ben Mears returned to 'Salem's Lot after a 25 year absence. In typical slasher movie fashion he runs into the "old coot" Isaiah Stoner, cemetery caretaker, who tells him to leave town like a typical crazy person in a horror movie. He also runs into his old BFF, Travis Sinclair, who is now the chief of police, then he runs into his alcoholic mom, then he runs into Nadine Somersby, the redhead who broke up with him in high school.
In a breathtaking act of wish fulfillment, Ben's job with the Portland Star and the two horror novels he's written make everyone instantly realize he is a superior being. Police chief Travis stares at himself in the mirror and reflects on how Ben "looks so much better than me and I’ve let myself go to pot." Ben’s alcoholic Mom promptly apologizes for becoming an alcoholic after his father died and taking her grief all out on him, saying "I apologize but I became an alcoholic after your father died and took it all out on you." Even redheaded Nadine sighs, "She found his rugged good looks every bit as stimulating as she had in high school, and she found herself marveling that she had ever been foolish enough to let him slip through her fingers."
I just want to say that I have written more than two books of the horror-type persuasion so if anyone is interested in offering me a blanket apology for the way they treated me in the past and if they also want to let me know that they were fools for letting me slip through their fingers, now’s your chance. Because I will totally laugh and dance around you in a circle chanting that now I’m too good for you…HA HA HA HA HA! Suck it, loser!
Ben will need all the validation he can get because no sooner has he entered Cemetery Ridge than two dangers rear their uggo heads. First, there are unruly teens riding rollerblades in Cemetery Ridge. The most evil rollerblader is Paxton Booth who has been sent to live with his evil uncle Victor. How evil is Paxton Booth?
"Paxton Booth tilted a can of pop to his lips and drank, slurping loudly just for the hell of it. He polished off the contents, crushed the can, and tossed it into the street."
WITHOUT EVEN PRETENDING TO RECYCLE IT!!!!!!! Truly, evil has been redefined in the pop-swilling person of Paxton Booth!!!!
Paxton has surrounded himself with a gang of kids only slightly less evil than himself. There's "Bill Paine, the only teen in the entire history of the Rogue River High School to be kicked off the football team for biting the nose off an opposing player." Jess Weaver "who was once voted the dumbest kid in his class by his homeroom peers." Then there are Manda Joyce and Cindy Drew who say things like "Oh, lover! You have me interested. What kind of pranks do you have in mind?" The kids "blade" around town slanging slangs like "Don’t go stratospheric on me, Unc," and "It would be neat to have a bag of candy to scarf down."
Boy, would it!!!
The second danger Ben encounters is that he soon finds the corpse of "old coot" Isaiah Stoner with a hole in the middle of his forehead and all his brains sucked out. What little brain matter remains is "dehydrated" and he and Nadine immediately realize that "Whatever got ahold of him enjoyed sucking the life from his body. We’re nothing more than lollipops to this monster." In short order, the book's Quint character, Fred Larkin, arms himself and hunts down this monster using his superior tracking abilities but the creature smashes his gun out of his hand "easily as you might yank a lollipop from a baby." This thing hates lollipops! Or maybe it likes them? Hard to know!
The police turn out to be "useless as tits on a turnip" and soon the creature has Cemetery Ridge gripped in panic and they've given it the nickname "The Brain Eater" and Ben teams up with Larkin and Nadine to defeat the creature, but it turns out that Victor, uncle of the evil Paxton Booth, is Nadine's ex and he's sending Paxton to get rid of Ben. This doesn't work and before you know it the monster reveals itself as an off-brand Predator: "The creature had a reptilian build, yet did not appear completely reptilian...the head was like that of a dragon, but a dragon of unbelievable ugliness...Piranha teeth rimmed a mouth able to swallow half a man in a single bite..." It also has a sparkle force field.
Realizing that this is beyond the ability of ordinary weapons, Larkin gets his crossbow and his dog while Ben goes to the library and does research. He discovers that the exact same thing happened in Cemetery Ridge 70 years ago, but police chief Travis says it's "coincidence!"
"Have you ever read about Halloween's history, how it got started, what it means?" Ben asks Travis. Then he floors him with this inescapable fact: because Halloween was started by the druids as the night when evil beings roam the earth, clearly this monster is not "an elf on steroids" and so it's probably the monster behind the legends and it's from another dimension and comes to our planet once every 70 years. That seals the deal and the sheriff is on board. Research!
The teens and the cops and Ben and Nadine all converge on Cemetery Ridge's cemetery where the kids have sex until the monster dismembers all of them except Paxton because he's related to Victor who will be somehow absorbed by the creature in the future when it will go from calling itself "The Three That Are One" to "The Four That Are One" so despite Paxton being "big and vital; the nectar would be especially zesty."
One of the kids fights the alien with a backhoe, and Larkin fights it with his crossbow, but it uses a brain blast to stop the kid and decapitation to stop Larkin. Then it stomps up and down on Larkin until he is "a gory pulp." Fortunately, like many seemingly impervious aliens who invade our planet from another dimension, the alien has a weakness for water and, using anti-freeze, wet crossbow bolts, and a wet dog, Ben gets it on the ropes before stabbing it in the eyes with two wet crossbow bolts. Then it starts to rain and the alien dissolves.
Standing in the middle of this carnage, Ben asks Nadine if she'd like to move to Portland with him. "Yes, yes, a thousand times yes,” she says just like Molly Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses but also because Cemetery Ridge is pretty much full of nothing but dead people without brains at this point.
And if that’s not enough for you this Halloween, here’s one more poem of terror from Prank Night!
Trick or Treat —
Death is sweet.
The dead shall rise,
The living to eat.
Born in Hell,
None shall quell
The Evil bred
For Man's Death Knell.