Halloween Ends by Paul Brad Logan

 

(pb; 2022: movie tie-in)

From the back cover

“The town of Haddonfield still lives in the shadow of Michael Myers. It has been four years since he mysteriously vanished. As Laurie attempts to put the tragedies of her past behind her, Allyson is desperate to get away from life with her grandmother in the dead-end town scorched by bloodshed.

“When local outcast Corey Cunningham discovers the truth of Michael’s whereabouts, he inadvertently unleashes a new wave of violence. With Haddonfield once more the backdrop to murderous impulses, Allyson endeavors to escape as Laurie prepares for one final confrontation with her boogeyman.”

 

Review

Logan, one of the screenwriters for the film version, is a mostly solid writer as far as expanding the story’s details and the background characters’ backgrounds (giving them names when they didn’t have them in the film, e.g., Christopher Nelson, the sewer bum who takes care of Michael Myers, and has a briefly linked past with the iconic killer). Unfortunately, Logan’s mostly solid writing can’t fix a disjointed story, with lead characters who, even if they changed in four years, feel like entirely different/new characters when compared to the first two films/novels—it’s as if the first two films/novels might as well as not existed, that this is not part of a wrap-up for the Halloween franchise. Rather, it feels like a side story that could’ve been titled Corey Cunningham: F**k-Up, with shoehorned appearances by Michael Myers, and a ridiculous final fate for Michael (which might’ve worked in a better-written film).

Ends, like its film version counterpart, has two competing storylines that should not exist within the same work. It’s like the screenwriters wanted to do a side film (that shouldn’t even be part of this supposed trilogy end-film/book) that also briefly showed Myers and a boring—yes, boring— and half-assed retread of Laurie Strode’s more-thrilling confrontations with Myers in Halloween (1978) and Halloween (2018). It’s nice that the filmmakers wanted to try something different (even beyond what they did in Halloween Kills, 2021) but this storyline is misguided, not scary, a “social message” Myers-has-new-psychic-powers film with truncated/badly patched-together scenes that add up to utter crap. If they’d stuck with Cunningham’s story (minus the possessed-with-Myers’s-evil element) it would’ve been an interesting Halloween side-story (perhaps titled Tales of Haddonfield) work. But it’s not. It’s disjointed, a betrayal of what went before with the characters (never mind the fact that Ends should’ve focused on Allyson, Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, like it did on the first two films, keeping with trilogic consistency).

Don’t waste your time with this unless you consider this a side Halloween alternate-universe work. Additionally, given Halloween Kills’s cliffhanger ending, it might be best to pretend Kills doesn’t exist, that John Passarella’s novelization of Halloween (2018) was the thus-far final (and worthwhile) entry in the Halloween franchise.

Airplane Novel by Paul A. Toth

(pb; 2011)

From the back cover:

"You must use extraordinary measures to tell an extraordinary story. This book might be a novel and it might not be a novel. The characters might be real and they might be fictions. Many of the events described happened or they did not.

"Rules will be broken.

"Our narrator is not a person. It is a building; the South Tower of the World Trade Center, whose height and thousand of windows provide the first truly-panoramic view of 9/11.

"Sometimes the only way to learn the truth is through fiction."



Review:

What I liked about Airplane:

Toth's view-skewed take on 9/11 deftly avoids jingoistic simple-mindedness, which mars many 9/11 works. Also, the fact that Toth was willing to write an ambitious and experimental novel is to be applauded.


What I didn't like about Airplane:

Toth's narrator (South Tower, a.k.a. "Cary Grant") constantly - after every few paragraphs - either says "Wait" or reminds the reader what a newbie writer he is (e.g., "Am I sympathetic? I must know, since this story requires me to be the most sympathetic character of all. Yes, no, maybe? Have I held your interest and caused the appropriate rate of pages turned per minute? Can you hardly wait the end, yet want the book not to end?").

The first few times the narrator does this, it works, but these unrelenting interruptions (including South Tower's transmissions) break whatever spell Toth's writing might have on this reader.

Toth warns his readers that "rules will be broken," but when said rule breaking doesn't work, it's time to rethink that approach.

Borrow this wildly experimental and choppy work from the library before committing cash to it.