Wednesday, March 23, 2022

Halloween Kills by Tim Waggoner

 

(2021: movie tie-in)

From the back cover

“Minutes after Laurie Strode, her daughter Karen, and granddaughter Allyson left masked monster Michael Myers caged and burning in Laurie’s basement. Laurie is rushed to the hospital with life-threatening injuries, believing she finally killed her lifelong tormentor.

“But when Michael manages to free himself from Laurie trap, his ritual bloodbath resumes. As Laurie fights her pain and prepares to defend herself again him, she inspires all of Haddonfield to rise up against their unstoppable monster. But as a group of other survivors of Michael’s first rampage decide to take matters into their own hands, a vigilante mob forms that sets out to hunt Michael down. Evil dies tonight.”


Review

Kills picks up immediately after the events of the 2018 version of Halloween, with Myers being inadvertently rescued from Laurie Strode’s burning house by clueless firefighters, resulting in a two-seconds-later, continued slaughter-spree on Myers’s part. As with John Passarella’s movie tie-in Halloween, Waggoner’s sequel writing is action-tight in its brutal, occasionally unsettling kill scenes, its tone consistently dramatic and suspenseful, and he expands a little on Michael’s point-of-view (unsettling and relentlessly hunter-minded) as well as those of other characters─Waggoner, unlike most writers I’ve read, deftly head-hops between characters’ outlooks without feeling writerly or impeding the feel and flow of Halloween Kills. This latest Halloween offering, flavored with a moral about mob justice, is a fast, brutal, and intriguing read, worth owning. Followed by Halloween Ends (author: Paul Brad Logan).

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Its counterpart/source film was released stateside on October 15, 2021. Information about it and its cast and crew can be found at IMDb’s Halloween Kills page.

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