Book: Candy Coated Murder by Kathleen Suzette is a cozy mystery set in the town of Pumpkin Hollow. When local busybody Hazel Martin is murdered, Mia Jordan tries to solve the mystery while also preventing the town’s corrupt mayor from cancelling the Halloween season.

Like many another cozy mystery, I think it’s best not to take it too seriously. The way the town politics are depicted is not exactly realistic, and the mystery isn’t really solved so much as the killer just eventually reveals themselves. Chuck Litka could have a field day reviewing this.

Having said that, I liked it well enough. It’s campy and quick and it’s about a town that’s obsessed with Halloween. We need to encourage that sort of thing.

Movie: The Uninvited (1944) Richard Pastore recommended this movie to me. It’s about a brother and sister who buy an old house on the coast of Cornwall. They soon learn the house is haunted. More than that, the house haunts the mind of a young girl in the nearby village, whose mother died there when she was very young.

The dynamic between the main characters is excellent, and the movie does a great job of balancing creepy supernatural scenes with light banter and comic relief. The acting is strong and the ghost effects are quite good for the time.

Last year I recommended The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and if you liked that film, I would recommend this as well.

Book: The Horror of Mistvale Hall by William Jeffrey Rankin. This is a creepy tale very much in the tradition of M.R. James. At least, it is for the first two-thirds or so. The last act is more of an action-horror story in the vein of Lovecraft, or even of games like Doom or Quake. This may seem incongruous, with James’s brand of horror being rather Victorian, but I actually liked the dissonance. Part of what made James’s stories effective was the sudden, jarring intrusion of terrifying abominations into a comedy of manners. A good mix of old and new styles of horror.

Book: Haunted Halloween by Gwen Taylor and Jen Booker. This is a cozy cruise ship mystery, although most of it does not actually take place on the ship, but in a haunted Irish castle. When a storm strands the tour group inside the castle overnight, the assistant director of the cruise (who is also named Mia, just like the protagonist of the other cozy mystery above) ends up having to solve a fifty year old murder to put a ghost to rest. The mystery was predictable, but the setting was pretty good. It also reminded me of…

Movie: High Spirits (1988) This is a horror comedy set in an Irish castle whose owner opens it to tourists to raise money, trying to play up the ghostly attractions of the place. However, it then turns out to actually be haunted.

Parts of it are quite good, especially the scenes with the late, great Peter O’Toole. (In his younger days, he’d have made a damn good Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd, BTW) Other parts are stupid, or in some cases downright unsettling and more than a little bizarre. The film is extremely uneven, but probably worth seeing just for O’Toole’s performance.

And now it’s your turn, dear reader. Have you any good Halloween-related media to recommend? We have less than a week to go, and I’m still trying to find just the right thing!