If you’re looking for truly terrifying fare to read aloud on Halloween, look no further than Vivian Vande Velde’s book, All Hallows’ Eve. All 13 stories in the collection take place on Halloween night. In Pretending, Brian drives into the country to pick up his date for the evening and discovers that her parents seem a lot like vampires or worse. Janelle visits a cemetery with her ninth-grade class in Cemetery Field Trio, only to receive help from a most unexpected source when she is attacked in a mausoleum. And in the truly frightening When and How, Marissa and her friends make a trip to a psychic who has the power to predict the time and place of death.
Readers will find themselves in good hands here. Vande Velde, who won an Edgar Award for her medieval mystery, Never Trust a Dead Man, is an expert at crafting hair-raising suspense. Deborah Hopkinson’s latest book for young readers is Into the Firestorm, A Novel of San Francisco 1906.
