Thread by @doctorow

In "The Halloween Moon," @NightValeRadio co-creator @PlanetofFinks brings his superb, unmatchable gift for balancing the weird and the real to a spooky middle-grades novel that echoes such classics as @neilhimself's Coraline.

harpercollins.com/products/the-h…

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If you're a stranger to Fink's work, the thing you need to know is that Nightvale and his other projects manage to walk the tightrope between weird, creepypasta-style humor and real pathos, in a gloriously disorienting, reeling storytelling style.

memex.craphound.com/2015/10/20/the…

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The Halloween Moon tells the sale of Esther Gold, a 13 year old who loves Halloween more than anything, and organizes her whole year around it. But this year, her parents have decreed that she is too old for trick-or-treating, a transition she is absolutely unwilling to make.

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Rather than heed her parents, Esther hatches a plan to drag her reluctant, Halloween-hating best friend, Augustin, out on a rule-breaking trick-or-treat, engineering a ruse to fool all the adults in their life.

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But something is wrong, this Halloween night. As the full moon rises and Esther and Augustin begin their rounds of the best trick-or-treat houses, they notice a distinct absence of kids, and no one is opening their doors.

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The world, it seems, has fallen asleep, and the familiar landscapes of their neighborhood now stretch and warp in nightmarish ways. Everywhere they go, they find slumbering kids and adults.

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But not all the world is asleep. There's the two creepy gents - brothers? - who pilot a pair of shambling, converted ice-cream trucks: one filled with razor-studded apples, the other with pumpkins that explode into walls of flames.

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And then there are the mysterious children (?) in rotting costumes, who make eerie, insectile clicking noises in place of speech.

There's Mr Gabler, the dentist-neighbor who earned Esther's undying mistrust by dispensing toothbrushes instead of candy at Halloween.

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For a dentist, Mr Gabler's pretty combat-ready, performing extraordinary feats of home defense as they run from the monsters that stalk the night, periodically quipping, "I wasn't always a dentist."

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Finally, there's Sasha, a cloistered girl with an overprotective mother who is also Esther's tormentor, bullying her with antisemitic tropes that she barely understands, even as Sasha herself is subjected to racist bullying by other kids.

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This is the setup for a wild chase through the endless Hallowe'en night, a night that has been claimed by the haughty Queen of Halloween, who has managed to pinch off a bubble of our world to turn into her eternal domain.

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Our heroes must traverse dreamlands, do battle with monsters, confront their loved ones in their own slumbering fantasies and try to awaken them to reality, and confront their own failures and tensions in a fast-moving, surreal-but-consequential adventure.

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If you love Nightvale (and you should), you know that dream-logic can be haunting, and sweet, and full of tension and meaning, despite its fuzzy edges and changing rules.

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Fink's middle-grades debut brings that same weird and glorious spookiness to a new kind of audience and a new kind of narrative - short, self-contained, punchy and very, very satisfying. It is certified, grade-A monster kid stuff.

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ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/09/23/rem…