THE DANCING PUMPKIN

In Butcher’s middle-grade Halloween tale, four young siblings accompany a dancing jack-o’-lantern on a fantastical quest to rid the world of a dangerous ogre.

Seven-year-old Tatiana Buttonburg is known among her family members for picking up on anything that’s out-of-place or otherworldly. When she proclaims that four grinning Halloween pumpkins on their doorstep are alive and watching them, her brothers—13-year-old Chris, 12-year-old Nickolas, and 5-year-old Steve—don’t initially believe her. One of the jack-o’-lanterns keeps moving out of position, and then, one night shortly before Halloween, the kids observe it tap-dancing. It wears polished shoes, gloves, and a black Victorian top hat, and the Buttonburg children quickly befriend the titular Dancing Pumpkin. It explains to them that Halloween monsters are real: “They know that people they can scare live within, so it’s the pumpkins’ job to keep them away,” it says, by biting their ankles. “If one gets bitten more than once on a single night, it shrinks down to the size of a pumpkin seed and must spend the rest of its years hiding under mushrooms and being chased by hungry birds,” he adds. The Buttonburgs insist on joining the pumpkin’s self-appointed mission to drag Finkgrinder, a child-eating ogre, into the sunlight. This will turn Finkgrinder to skunk cabbage and thus thwart his plans to teach merely scary monsters how to “hunt and hurt people,” like they used to do. The kids set off in giant, royal Thunderbelly pumpkins, but are attacked by witches. Chris is captured and taken by the witch Gingly to be her apprentice warlock—and, most likely, to be her supper. Will the Buttonburg children and their allies survive this adventure?

Butcher, who’s written multiple ocean-set stories for adults,including Jonah and Razor Mouth (both 2022), tells his tale of the Buttonburgs in short, punchy chapters and omniscient, past-tense narration. The prose is simple but lively throughout the short novel, and it makes effective use of visual imagery, both for scene-setting (“The afternoon sunlight slanted through the trees and made the leaves glow blood red, burnt orange, and gold”) and for fun character vignettes: “She had a prickly voice and was shaped like a big beanbag.” The author portrays each of the four kids as a unique individual with their own distinct traits and agency: Chris is depicted as an action hero with his golf-ball slingshot, and Nickolas as an occult-savvy bookworm; Tatiana makes good use of her empathy and second sight; and young Steve has a 5-year-old’s priorities and preoccupations. The Dancing Pumpkin introduces them all to a world that’s wondrous in the extreme, and scary only in a safe Halloween-like fashion, as presaged by the kids’ father’s bumbling karate encounter with an oatmeal man in an early chapter. Humor appears throughout the book—in tone, word choice, and action—and should serve to ensure that younger readers are amused, rather than afraid. As a result, the final showdown is perhaps a tad low-key, but this doesn’t detract from the overall magic of the journey.

A fleet-footed adventure for young readers, evocative of a fun and frightful season.