Title: Nightmare in the Limbo of Halloween
Author: Behzad Almasi
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 978-15049-3482-4
Pages: 246
Genre: Thriller

Reviewed by: J.W. Bankston

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With a tale that feels as timeless as Dante Aligheri’s “Divine Comedy” and as foreboding as Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Behzad Almasi has crafted a story equal parts allegory and horror. Almasi utilizes simple language and repetitive (but never tedious) scenes. With this technique, “Nightmare in the Limbo of Halloween” grows every more frightening. It soon resembles a suffocating blanket on a fog-shrouded night.

Indeed, fog and other oppressive atmospherics are almost their own characters. The story opens as the main character struggles, near-drowned and covered in muck along the banks of a river. He later awakens within a bizarre house, tended to and perhaps imprisoned by an unctuous servant. Mandible metaphors multiply. The grim, ghastly teeth of the servant class are echoed with the hyenas witnessed by the protagonist in both nightmares and daymares. For him, visits to restaurants, banquets and theaters are rarely pleasant. They are instead, a tightening of thumbscrews. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” warned the sign over the Gates of Hell in the opening “Inferno” section of Dante’s masterwork. Here the first Circle of Hell, or Limbo, is a place of unsatisfying delights. Masks both real and constructed reveal as much as they hide.

Almasi reportedly spent eight years revising this novel. It shows. Every line is precise, every moment calculated to keep tension building. Every step of this novel’s journey grows more fraught and frightening. Impeding doom awaits. Escape seems impossible. The river from which the main character escaped might well be named Styx. Its sole boater may be the ferryman. As Chris de Burgh cautioned in his 1980s hit, “Don’t pay the ferryman, don’t even fix a price…”

I’ll let readers discover this novel’s many other secrets. Although, perhaps, not all readers. If you have a sensitive nature, given to being startled by loud noises and shrinking from undefined shadows, this may not be the right book for you. Because “Nightmare in the Limbo of Halloween” is one of those novels that lingers long after you stop reading. The mental images it creates will probably reappear even on days that aren’t fogbound.

Two thoughts, offered primarily because our modern age allow regular revision and reimagining. There are some lavishly illustrated versions available of “Divine Comedy.” If Almasi collaborates with an illustrator, they could produce something similarly amazing. Almasi is Iranian; my best cultural touchstone here is the bizarre but interesting “A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night.” The movie is often described as the first “Iranian Vampire Western.” It inspired a later graphic novel, an ideal form for the next version of “Nightmare in the Limbo of Halloween.” My second thought, is that while I appreciate the author’s decision to eliminate “breathing room” by eliminating chapter breaks, I would still prefer them. I’m not bound by the rules. Still, counterintuitively even in darker works the breaking up of sections can actually keep the reader focused. This is a minor criticism as this author has achieved the winning status of the prestigious Pacific Book Award 2016 contest. Given the right marketing, I think this novel could be one of the few that succeeds each year from outside of the traditional Western sources.