The Halloween Store and Other Tales of All Hallows' Eve is a truly Halloween not horror focused collection. Evoking ghouls and candy corns, this novel feels just right for the Halloween season.
This book contains five Halloween stories, two essays, and a beautifully written introduction. Reading these tales made me feel like I was being comforted by a warm fire. 

While Halloween inherently invokes nostalgia, I was pleasantly surprised by the modern ties of these stories. As someone who began trick or treating in the 2000s, seeing kids with cell phones made me feel like the stories were actually about folks my age. The fact that Kelly prefaces the collection with a note on the pandemic was especially poignant as 2020 marked the definitive end of my time trick o' treating. The included tales run the gamut of Halloween subjects but are all enticingly spine chilling. My largest complaint about Kelly's work here is the fact that the stories are short enough as to end very abruptly.

While the setup for the titular story is spooky for example, the fact that it ends with pure chaos and no resolution to an outbreak of masks that transform their wearers into creatures of the night felt underwhelming. I wonder if Kelly did not know how a town could recover from such an event and so instead just ended the story before addressing the repercussions.

While the stories included here are all fun, I particularly enjoyed Kelly's essays. Learning about his experiences with Halloween over time made me reminisce on my childhood escapades. As I think about my future, I'm hoping I'll continue to treat holidays with the solemnity I gave them as a kid.