This horror/thriller story follows multiple residents of Parmenter Road on Halloween night, 1984. In order to distract them from the problems in their lives coming to a head tonight, they head out to enjoy the holiday festivities. Mixed in with the children of the neighborhood are other children dressed in vintage costumes and makeup. These eerie kids are terrified of someone they call The Cunning Man and ask other children to keep them safe from him as he hunts them down.
I loved the atmosphere of this read and it really captures that later-autumn feeling. Halloween is so integral to the plot, setting, and characters that it really permeated the whole story. While obviously you can read Halloween books all year round, it is a tiny bummer that this wasn't able to be published closer to actual Halloween. We get so many great autumnal details for all of the senses that I wished I had a PSL while reading. The beginning of the story leaned toward the more family-friendly fall vibes but as night falls and we start to be introduced to The Cunning Man, these same vibes become increasingly sinister.
The horror elements were fantastic and leaned into the creepy kid trope in a really fun way. There's a bit of body horror and gore, but for the most part creepy kids ruled the day. I've never heard of The Cunning Man before and a quick google didn't come up with him being a commonly known entity and it did feel like a fresh take on this type of set up. The first half had a lot of interpersonal conflict while these families we're following address some pretty significant situations in their lives. The second half is where we get into more of the horror and ramps up quickly and we get into the more thriller-y parts. I loved the supernatural horror elements and how they were introduced to the reader really seamlessly through the plot points.
I overall enjoyed the pacing, but did find this a bit slow in the beginning. For the first 1/3, the pacing wasn't at the point that was driving me to turn the pages. Instead, it read more like a domestic drama. The pacing does pick up over the course of the story and I found myself much more engaged by the halfway mark. It seemed like all the layers of this story - the interpersonal conflicts, the horror, etc - were all a bit of a slower burn. Also, while we are getting all the POVs set up, there was a lot of hopping around and following these characters so we can gather basic information which, again, made the very beginning feel slower.
I didn't love the multi-POV element as much as I normally do and it is because I had a bit of a hard time differentiating the different characters. I didn't feel like the character voices or characterization details were significant enough for me. There were multiple times I had to flip back to the beginning of the chapter to remember who we were following. I do think the choices Golden made about who should be the POV choices were really smart. I think all of the POVs were interesting in their own way and added a layer to the story. I also enjoyed how these POV choices enabled us to bounce around the neighborhood to all the various festivities which was fun to see.
Overall, this was a great atmospheric Halloween read with fantastic horror elements. I do wish we had gotten to the meat of the story a little more quickly.
TW/CW: infidelity, domestic violence, homophobia, child abuse
Thanks to NetGalley and St Martin's Press for the ARC
Expected publication date is January 24, 2023
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