This is the ninth entry in a month-long series focusing on a horror anthology edited by Patton Oswalt called The Ghost Box (buy it here). The blog will resume its standard format in November.
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If there’s one thing that has been impressed upon me reading through The Ghost Box, it is that for a horror story to really triumph, it must stick the landing. Don’t get the ending right and the whole story suffers. There are a few tales in The Ghost Box that build the tension expertly, then fumble when they need to soar. “Pumpkin Head,” by Al Sarrantonio, does not fumble. This is a story that exists for its ending, and it is unforgettable. A surreal fantasia of horror, it is absurd and terrifying simultaneously, a nightmare that left me sitting in cold, silent dread.
“My lunch and dinner, my dinner and breakfast.”
Al Sarrantonio was born in New York City in 1952. A prolific writer, he has authored more than fifty-five books and close to a hundred short stories. For his editorial work, he has won the Bram Stoker Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. “Pumpkin Head” was first published in a 1982 anthology edited by Charles L. Grant called Terrors (which also includes one of my favorite Stephen King stories, “Survivor Type”). It was selected for several “best of” horror anthologies the following year, as well as Sarrantonio’s short story collection Toybox. It was also printed in a 1998 anthology called Dangerous Vegetables (I am mildly sad that there was no Again, Dangerous Vegetables).
The plot of “Pumpkin Head” is simple. It’s Halloween, and an elementary school teacher is throwing a party for her students. There’s a new student in the class, Raylee. She’s shy and doesn’t want to participate in group activities. Much to the teacher’s delight, Raylee agrees to tell a story to the class. It’s a horrible, scary story about a boy named Pumpkin Head. The teacher cuts Raylee off before she can finish, but a sympathetic classmate invites her to a Halloween party, where she finishes her story to the sound of screams.
“Pumpkin Head” is a perfect Halloween story. It is a horror story set on Halloween, of course, but this is just the surface. It is a Halloween story in its use of language as well; the story opens with a description of “an orange and black afternoon,” then segues to “a black and orange night” later. It also works as a Halloween story on a thematic level. This story is about costumes: not merely literal ones, but the metaphorical ones we wear in public to protect ourselves, or others, or both. Prying off someone else’s mask can carry a fatal risk; what if there is a monster underneath?
Sarrantonio’s writing is gorgeous. Many horror writers take a page from the playbook of Richard Matheson, writing in sparse, effective prose. Sarrantonio has a more musical ear; his sentences are melodies. He evokes autumn so vividly that you can feel the nip of the cold on your skin and hear the delighted cries of costumed children on the street:
“A black and orange night.
Here came a black cat walking on two legs; there two percale sheet ghosts trailing paper bags with handles; here again a miniature man from outer space. The wind was up: leaves whipped along the serpentine sidewalk like racing cars. There was an apple-crisp smell in the air, an icicle down your spine, here-comes-winter chill. Pumpkins everywhere, and a half-harvest moon playing coyly with wisps of high shadowy clouds. A thousand dull yellow night-lights winked through breezy trees on a thousand festooned porches. A constant ringing of doorbells, the wash of goblin traffic: they traveled in twos, threes, or fours, these monsters, held together by Halloween gravity.”
“Halloween gravity”! What a sublime way to describe how trick-or-treaters huddle together. Every paragraph yields such linguistic treasures, even if they are in service to a story that turns out to be rather ugly (in the introduction to The Ghost Box, Patton Oswalt describes it as “perfectly-calculated gracelessness”).
There’s not much more for me to say here, except that I loved “Pumpkin Head.” On quality of writing alone it surpasses most of the other selections in the anthology, but it is also, for me, the most viscerally terrifying story in the collection thus far. If you are a fan of horror and you haven’t read Al Sarrantonio, you’re missing out.
NEXT TIME: “The Treader of the Dust” by Clark Ashton Smith!
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