Samanta, Tiago e Mandy são irmãos. Os pais deles decidem descansar um pouco em uma tranquila aldeia no fim de semana do Dia das Bruxas. Os adolescentes estão muito preocupados, pois ficar em uma aldeia chata vai estragar a brincadeira de travessuras ou gostosuras. Com certeza, o Dia das Bruxas será bem diferente do normal, mas longe de ser uma chatice! Samanta descobre um velho livro de feitiçaria e rapidamente percebe que é capaz de controlar perigosos poderes. Logo, ela é levada para um mundo terrível e sinistro de magos e bruxos, e precisa escapar ou perderá a vida.
Edgar J. Hyde's writing style is just absolutely atrocious - so much so that I may be done with these lame Creepers books forever. The story follows sibling trio Samantha, James and Mandy who end up having to spend Halloween in a village (for no apparent reason other than their parents randomly decided they wanted to go there). Samantha, the oldest of the trio, starts reciting spells and soon enough all kinds of crazy stuff goes down. Cornelius Brown, the story's antagonist, is really stupid and it totally kills the vibe. There is also nothing very Halloween-y in this other than the fact that the kids want to go trick-or-treating. This wasn't Nola Thacker (aka D.E. Athkins/Tom B. Stone)-level bad, but this was really bad. This gets a 2/5 as opposed to a 1 because there was a decently graphic death towards the end, and I do respect the author for being slightly edgier in this series than what you'd expect after reading the other Goosebumps knockoffs series. Not recommended.
It was an honest drag to get through and leaned too heavily on exposition. The saving grace is it had a solid premise and the rules of magic didn't really exist, which served for a chaotic finale that managed to bewilder me.
For a book named 'Happy Halloween' it had very little/almost nothing to do with Halloween itself. I did really like how much this revolved around magic and spells but I wish it had leant more into horror rathan than it being more fantasy based. There's also a weird story beat throughout where our protagonists (a thirteen year old and two twelve year olds) seem to be obsessed with drinking tea, which just didn't seem believable to me and felt a strange narrative choice (2.5 rounded up).
One by Simon Bedding. I liked the story, although I lost interest at some of the fight scenes. I remember the bit about the mouldy vampire teeth very clearly from my childhood reading for some reason. Not that keen on the prose style, and my children's choice edition has a lot of mistakes in.