Halloween Rain

I picked up Halloween Rain not expecting much.

Physically, it’s a slim paperback, around 160 pages with fairly generous print. Doctor Who fans will know what I mean if I compare it to a slightly expanded Target novel from the classic era of that franchise. It has that same quick, accessible feel – but it won’t be confused for Shakespeare.

The prose is clearly aimed at a teenage audience. There’s plenty of snappy dialogue, which works well and absolutely suits Season 1 of Buffy (which is the story’s setting), and the series more broadly.

A big issue for me, however, is that the snappy tone doesn’t stop when the dialogue ends. The narration itself adopts that same quippy rhythm, almost as if one of the teen characters is telling you the story. And if not one of the characters, perhaps Chandler Bing from Friends has wandered in to handle the descriptive passages. It’s just got that kind of smart arse/wise ass tone to it.

And honestly, that approach can be wearing. You have to tune yourself into a particular mindset to fall into its rhythm, and if you’re not in the mood (such as I was most nights, winding down to go to sleep), it can feel like a real chore compared with straighter, more neutral descriptive prose.

On the positive side, the actual story does feel authentically Buffy. It plays like a monster of the week episode from Season 1. We have the kids at school, Giles researching in the library, a trip to the Bronze, some vampires, and even an unexpected, but welcome, swarm of zombies. The finale, with Buffy facing off against Samhain, the so called king of Halloween, kicks the story up another gear.

In fact, the closing stretch of the story, culminating in a pretty brutal and bloody fight for Buffy, feels slightly bigger in scope than what the show could have managed in its first season, but still entirely believable. Nothing excessive, nothing that breaks the tone of early Buffy and makes you think, “No way could this happen in Season 1…” even if we didn’t see anything like it on-screen. It just feels like a modestly higher budget version of something that “could have” aired that first year.

The inclusion of some backstory about a previous Slayer from Ireland, Erin Randall, is nicely handled and adds an interesting layer of lore without ever overwhelming the central plot in any way.

So I’m genuinely at a crossroads with this one. Is it very young adult in style, very easy to read, and occasionally borderline irritating in its narrative voice until the final confrontation? Yes. But does it feel like Buffy? Does it feel like a missing episode from Season 1? Absolutely it does.

It’s a tricky one to rate. I’m leaning toward a 6 out of 10, though I worry that might be slightly generous. On the other hand, 5 out of 10 feels a touch too harsh for something that I think is achieving in what it set out to be. But, either way, we’re off and racing with this range!