Click or Treat! The Best of Halloween and Horror on the Internet, by Rich Gray
Book Review by Paul Goat Allen
Have you read this book?
The idea behind Click or Treat! - a reference guide to all things Halloween on the Net - was a good one. A book that includes brief synopses of interesting and educational web sites for parents, teachers and horror aficionados of all ages is, in theory, pretty cool. And some of the themes of the chapters within are very interesting - buying and/or making Halloween costumes, designing and carving pumpkins, finding cool Halloween recipes, downloading related clipart and screen savers, the history of various legends, etc. But the largest - and most ineffective - section of the guide, the chapter listing web sites to horror movies, horror fiction and horror-related television shows, was simply not helpful and quickly became mind-numbingly boring. I can understand a few pages of media-related sites - Stephen King, the Twilight Zone, H.P. Lovecraft, Alfred Hitchcock, etc. - but 51 pages out of a 172-page book was overkill.
I absolutely loved the chapters on Last Rites: Funeral Customs, Cemeteries and Epitaphs and Monsters, Witches and Demons and actually found some fantastic web sites that I had never even heard of before (www.deathclock.com, www.findagrave.com and www.elchupacabra.com, to name a few) that are now on my favorites list.
But in the end, I just can't recommend spending $29.95 - yes, $29.95! - for a paperback reference guide that isn't even 200 pages and contains large sections that seemed like nothing more than filler. While the idea for the guidebook of this nature was solid and some sections were surprisingly entertaining and informative, I can't in good conscience endorse a $29.95 book that has entire sections that in my opinion are valueless. This Halloween reference guide is definitely a trick - not a treat....
Paul Goat Allen is the editor of Barnes & Noble's Explorations science fiction/fantasy book review and is the author of Burning Sticks, Old Winding Way and Warlock Dreams.
I absolutely loved the chapters on Last Rites: Funeral Customs, Cemeteries and Epitaphs and Monsters, Witches and Demons and actually found some fantastic web sites that I had never even heard of before (www.deathclock.com, www.findagrave.com and www.elchupacabra.com, to name a few) that are now on my favorites list.
But in the end, I just can't recommend spending $29.95 - yes, $29.95! - for a paperback reference guide that isn't even 200 pages and contains large sections that seemed like nothing more than filler. While the idea for the guidebook of this nature was solid and some sections were surprisingly entertaining and informative, I can't in good conscience endorse a $29.95 book that has entire sections that in my opinion are valueless. This Halloween reference guide is definitely a trick - not a treat....
Paul Goat Allen is the editor of Barnes & Noble's Explorations science fiction/fantasy book review and is the author of Burning Sticks, Old Winding Way and Warlock Dreams.
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