Will I love A Night in the Lonesome October?

This is a fairy tale that draws on the tropes of 20th century Horror movies. It's easy to dismiss the simple, direct style as simplistic, but it has hidden depths that Zelazny effortlessly navigates on the journey through the month of October and to the ceremony that will take place on Halloween. It draws the reader into a strange world that nonetheless is so familiar.

When I read this at 17, I bounced off it, surprising since I'd loved every previous Zelazny. It wasn’t until a reread in my thirties that it finally clicked, becoming a favorite book by a favorite author. In retrospect, I didn’t yet have the depth of experience to see beneath the surface simplicity to the brilliantly conceived complexity visible to the reader with a bit more knowledge and breadth of literary background.

Wit shines on every page, from dialogue to description to an offbeat chapter-a-day structure highlighting each night in a most singular October.

The wild includes plenty of murder… show more.

This is such a wonderful mash-up of different elements all brought together.

Frankenstein, the werewolf, Dracula, Jack the Ripper, elder gods, and so much more. This book showed me that a writer can take a traditionally bleak subject and turn it around into something fun. One of the most interesting parts of this book comes from the readers rather than the author.

The book is split into thirty-one chapters, one for each day in October. Fans of this novel will read it one chapter per night throughout that month, experiencing each occurrence at the same time as the characters.

An overlooked classic by the late Roger Zelazny, at one chapter per day, A Night in Lonesome October is a perfectly paced journey through the spookiest month. Narrated by Snuff the watchdog (yes, an actual dog!), readers are quickly introduced to the month-long Game between “openers” and “closers,” magical agents preparing their spells to release/contain Lovecraftian Elder Gods. While the human “players” are a who’s who of the classics – Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, the Universal Monsters, and more – it’s their richly-drawn talking animal companions that take center stage to unravel the hidden patterns and machinations. A star-studded… show more.