Ancient Paperback Review: Hell-O-Ween by David Robbins

Oh C'MON.

I wanted to love this book. Everything I read about it, and the other things in the genre the author has written, made me really want to seek it out. Several rave reviews, noting it's b-movie fun, heavy gore and cave-dwelling monsters, led me to believe that this was going to be my jam. I was pretty stoked to find it for a few dollars at a local used bookstore.

I don't really know how or why, but something went completely wrong.

The plot of the book plays like Night of the Demons meets The Descent, with seven teenagers deciding to spend their Halloween night in a cave. Seven of the most bland teenagers you've ever met who are walking caricatures of themselves, culled from other sources. A crew of red demon creatures live in the cave and pick our blandies   off one by one. And you now know everything about this book.

Literally.

The biggest, most collosal problem with Hell-O-Ween is that if you've consumed any horror media of any kind, of the past 40 years, not a single thing you don't expect to happen, will happen. Everyone you expect to die, will die. Everyone you expect to live, will live. Every ho-hum happening will happen with the least verve, the least zest you can fathom.

And it's a real bummer. David Robbins can clearly write. The words he chooses to execute his mundane exercise are exceptional, they don't really deserve the story.

This ability to write well makes the affair even more strange, because​ the book is both very overwritten and underwritten at the same time. It's about 100 pages too long for what it is, but none of those 100 do anything the reader needs them to do... things like explain who the demons are, how they got there, why they are there, how they developed a taste for human flesh, how they survive...on and on and on...instead it's 100 extra pages of extra description of what the cave looks like; trite, interpersonal subplots of what high school kid wants to screw who; and breasts, both human and demonic referred to as melons. Over and over again.

It's the Horror novel my 12 year old self would write. Which, to it's credit, can be fun at times. There's some pretty gruesomely explicit gore and violence. The characters just stop, drop and have sex in the middle of a cave, even if their buddy just got eviscerated. The dialogue is so hilariously dated and bad that it's impossible to not laugh out loud while reading this. It's so dumb, it's fun at points.

But the fun unfortunately wears out it's welcome. This is an almost 400-page book. 300, even 250, would have sufficed to tell the same story just fine.

Anyway, if you're absolutely out of all things to read or need to buy an old horror novel for the pubescent boy in your life, this will do.

Otherwise, you've read it before. A whole lot of times.

2.5/5.