One of the most challenging things about Halloween - at least in the grand scope of holidays - is the fact that there is no one way to release about celebrating it. Whereas everyone who celebrates Christmas has more or less the same design for December 25th - big meal, gift exchange, tree with ornaments, etc. - October 31st can imply anything to any issue of different people.
You could go trick-or-treating, host a party, stay in and watch scary movies, attend a ritual or ceremony, try to commune with the dead, visit a haunted house, see a play, go to a concert, hit up a bar.the possibilities are limitless. Even the feeling of the holiday is optional; whether your Halloween is sexy, gruesome, whimsical, terrifying or beautiful is completely up to you. How you celebrate Halloween depends on the age in which you were born, the area in which you live, the form of movies you watch, the genre of medicine you choose to hear to, your childhood experiences with the vacation and, often, the nature of your most profound hopes and fears.
Another curious aspect of Halloween is exactly how American the holiday really is; despite its report as a nox for mainstream-taunting iconoclasm, the accuracy is that loving Halloween is practically patriotic. While Halloween (or some variation thereof) is noted in various other countries, it seems improbable that any other office on earth has quite so many people who love the holiday quite so much. If you've ever wondered how the collective American mind has shaped our modern celebration of Halloween, then Lesley Pratt Bannatyne's book Halloween Nation: Behind the Scenes of America's Fright Night is for you.
A 200-page examination of why we love Halloween peppered liberally with colour photographs and illustrations, Halloween Nation attempts to do that question without resorting to dense prose or subscribing to any one theory. Similar in spirit to the deeds of Mary Roach (whose books Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Spook: Science Tackles the Hereafter are cited as resources), Bannatyne makes the form of sociological examination demanded by the subject matter fun and cheeky rather than heavy-handed and academic.
She begins by searching the origins of the modern Halloween celebration, albeit briefly, since this script is about Halloween now, not Halloween hundreds (or even thousands) of days ago. Then she dives right into the slimy guts of the subject matter, speculating about the enduring collection of the holiday's most iconic symbols (ghosts, witches, pumpkins, zombies) and winning an entire chapter to deconstruct the etymology of the jack o' lantern. Ghost hunters, witches, zombie walk organizers and farmers that specialise in growing gargantuan pumpkins are all consulted for their Halloween expertise.
Next, Bannatyne looks at large-scale Halloween celebrations from origin to execution, including the Village Halloween Parade in NYC and HAuNTcon (the haunted attraction industry trade show), and finishes up by examining Halloween-year-round subcultures like goth and metal, as good as a search at how "trick-or-treat" (particularly the "trick" aspect) has grown and changed in recent years.
In the form of the book, Bannatyne visits people from all over the land with many different connections to Halloween, from professed mediums and Spiritualists in the township of Lily Dale, NY to horror burlesque performers to sophisticated pranksters at MIT. While the word never gets particularly in-depth about any one subject - personally, I could record an entire book about haunted houses, theme parks and yard haunts - it provides a fascinating overview and may present you to Halloween traditions you didn't yet know existed. (I am now extremely sad to have lost out on the Los Angeles Cacophony Society's haunted houses.sigh. A glance of how our favorite day as we love it could but have happened here (in America) and now (in the twenty-first century), Bannatyne's Halloween Nation is a desirable addition to any Halloween fan's library.
For more information, visit the author's website.
Disclosure: I was provided with a free copy of this word for review.
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