Get Hold Of Prank Night Engineered By David Robbins Presented As Booklet

when you spy the greenish silver glow of the embossed text on the cover, you know what you are in for.
This is fun, cheesy horror from the very end of the mass market horror boom, This is my first read by Robbins and I really enjoyed it, It was enjoyable in the same way a regional, low budget horror film with some ok effects and serviceable acting is.
While it won't win any awards for excellence in its field, it is very enjoyable if this is your kind of thing, and makes none of the blunders that many novels of its ilk make.
The pace is quick and Robbins writes in swift, clean prose, Not a mind blower or sucker, but a fun read for those who like their horror nice and cheesy and competently written.
Looking forward to reading more of Robbins' horror novels, Weak. . Not too many thrills Afteryears away, Ben Shields comes home to Cemetery Ridge, a once prosperous mining community, now nearly a ghost town.
On his way in, Ben sees a funeral procession, escorted by an old friend, Travis Sinclair, now the chief of police.
Ben stops to stretch his legs and catch up with Travis, who tells Ben it's Horace they're burying another close friend of theirs from back in the day.

Travis tells Ben the official cause of death was a bear attack, but there's something off about the whole thing.
The best tracking dogs around refused to set foot in the woods after this "bear, " Unknown to anyone but Travis, Horace is the third victim in a string of bizarre attacks, And last but not least, the local doctor ran a full panel of labs on Horace, finding not one trace of protein in his blood something essential to life.

Local poacher and the best hunter/tracker in town, Fred Larkin, sets his sights on this "bear," hoping to bag it and make a nice profit.
When he gets to the woods where Horace was killed, he finds tracks he's never seen before in his life, They certainly aren't bear tracks there are three toes with claw marks like those of a dinosaur, By the size and spacing, Fred estimates the creature to beft tall and weighing approximately,lbs, walking on two legs.
Fred is freaked out, but incredibly excited for it's not often he gets challenged on a hunt, However, what Fred comes face to face with in the woods that day is not what he was expecting, It's not even of this world, He can hear its voice inside his head, speaking of a "feast," and a blinding white light it emits that paralyzes him.
It's only by miracle alone that Fred makes it out of the woods alive that day,
As more and more horrible deaths plague the citizens of

Cemetery Ridge, it becomes obvious to everyone this is no bear.
Ben becomes determined to find out the truth about this mystery creature before he goes back home, and starts to rely on his old girlfriend, Nadine.
At the library, they discover a newspaper from Octoberst,years prior, stating people in town were being slain by something citizens started calling the "Brain Eater," found dead in the same manner as those that died recently with holes bored into the center of their foreheads.
Ben is confused, but sees a pattern between past and present day, that the killings are taking place on or around Halloween which is coming up very soon, and they all seem to center around the cemetery.

Will Ben, Nadine, Travis and Fred be able to solve the decades old mystery of the Brain Eater before it kills even more people this Halloween

SPOILERS PAST THIS POINT

So, I love everything I read from David Robbins.
His books are always quick, easy and fun reads, But this book drove me nuts at the end cause I got no answers, Where did the Brain Eater come from Why did it live in the cemetery What was its connection to the Richard's Why did water hurt it Why did it only come out around Halloween Why was there ayear gap between it's appearances SO MANY QUESTIONS.
Other than that, a great book, Halloween: traditionally the night when extradimensional lizard people roam the earth, sucking brains, They are also allergic to water, so it's basically SIGNS with more brain sucking, I didn't hate it but I didn't love it either, I felt some of the characters weren't needed and if you're gonna have am unknown creature at least give some explanation for it.
The ending was ehh. If you're familiar with David Robbins, it's probably because you enjoy survival stories or westerns, He's the author of the longrunning Endworld series of postapocalyptic novels, he's lent his talents to several entries in the Executioner Men's Adventure series, and borrowed Ralph Compton's brand to pen a few lonesome cowboy stories.
The guy even wrote a Hardy Boys adventure under the "Franklin W, Dixon" pseudonym early in his career, so he kind of spans the genres, But before churning out professional Mad Max fanfic and gunslinging Westerns, David Robbins got his break when he wrote Blood Cult for Leisure's horror line in.
But that Prank Night's ridiculously expensive on the secondary market I've seen copies go for upwards ofon eBay, and I've never managed to lay hands on it.
Nor have I yet found a copy of HellOWeen, which was his 'breakout' horror story fromand typically crosses themark.
I was delighted, however, to run across a beattohellandback copy of Prank Night for under five dollars, and decided to make it my first Robbins read.
I was suitably impressed and will be keeping my eye out for more of his stuff in the future, but it wasn't all fun and games.
So let's go take a walk down by the cemetery and see what's stirring,

You're not scared, are you, . .



Ben Shields is heading back to the sleepy little Oregon town of Cemetery Ridge, In the nine years since he left for the big city, he's turned into a minor celebrity, with two horror novels under his belt and a reasonably successful career in journalism which keeps the lights on and the gas tank filled.
But if Ben's changed for the better in that neardecade, Cemetery Ridge has taken a turn for the worse, Traffic's even more sparse on main street, the local bank's gone out of business, and something nasty came out of the woods the other night and slaughtered his old friend Horace Walker.
Folks are whispering about a bear attack, but sheriff Travis Sinclair saw the body and he's never seen any bear do that to a person before.


Then again, maybe it's not all bad, Ben's old sweetheart Nadine Somersby is newlydivorced from town scion Victor Richards, and it's clear she realized she made a mistake by choosing Victor's money over Ben's love all those years ago.


Of course, Ben remembers Victor as the guy who could never let anything go not in athletics, and definitely not in relationships.
As if that's not enough, Victor's thuggish nephew Paxton is in town, shipped off from his mom's home in Colorado to hopefully straighten himself out before he ruins his life.
Paxton's only been in town a few days, and has already put together his own little gang of troublemakers, It's late October, Halloween's on the way, and Paxton's got some ideas for throwing a prank night the likes of which Cemetery Ridge has never seen before.
All the while, the body count rises, By the time Halloween arrives in Cemetery Ridge, it will be a night no one can forget, . . assuming they survive to see daylight,



I thoroughly enjoyed Prank Night right up until the last few pages when I realized Robbins was falling victim to his own page count and didn't leave himself enough room to do more than give the story a quickanddirty ending which it did not deserve.
Atpages, Prank Night falls into standard novellength territory, but the story Robbins weaves is compelling enough that I found myself wanting more as I approached the final chapter.
Sure enough, my fears were confirmed as Robbins hits pageand is forced to wrap everything up in anotherand/rd pages.
The characters in this book are worth far better than that, and I don't think anyone would have suffered if he had used another ten pages to close things up a little neater.
Maybe Leisure had him on a really tight deadline, or the editor at the time this was, so Don D'Auria hadn't come on board yet was a stickler for page count, or maybe Robbins just didn't know the best way to finish what he started.
Whatever the case, Robbins is hardly the first horror writer I've encountered who bangs out a killer novel then fails to stick the landing in the last few pages.
Richard Laymon has stepped out on me so many times in that regard I should have kicked his ass to the curb twenty years ago, but damn if I don't rush to forgive him every time he lured me back with the promise to have changed his ways.
What can I say When it was good between us, it was damn good,

Laymon's also been dead since, so I'll get back on track before somebody starts thinking I'm the president of some sort of necrophilia club.


The main issue I have with the story in Prank Night is the same one I have with a plethora of other horror movies: the witnesses and survivors of the attacks on Cemetery Ridge behave like not telling the truth is the best thing they could possibly do, and in fact some of them plan to leave town before the police can start asking questions.
Um maybe you jerks don't realize it, but several prominent and wellknown members of the town were killed by this thing, not to mention at least one law enforcement officer.
There are going to be questions, and heading out before the county sheriff can sit down for a chat with you isn't going to look good.
Murders are murders, after all, and the cops don't stop investigating just because key witnesses skipped town, Plus, given the nature of Paxton's ultimate prank, Cemetery Ridge is going to spend hundreds of hours spent cleaning things up in the aftermath.
Dashing off before being asked to help is kind of a dick move by all involved, I'll chalk it up to Robbins running up against his own page count this time, but we'll see if further reading reveals a writer who's great at coming up with new stories, but not so hot at concluding them in a satisfactory manner.


Pseudospoiler alert, it's no bear stalking the residents of Cemetery Ridge, I'm honestly not sure exactly what it is, since Robbins never comes out and gives us a name or even an explanation for what the monster is or where it came from.
There are hints dropped, sure, but nothing concrete, We do spend some time in the creature's head, so we get an idea of what its goals are, Between that and the descriptions of what it does to its victims, we can conclude it's really not a nice thing at all.
Still, while not knowing exactly what this thing is, and why one particular substance can harm it when bullets and shotgun slugs don't even faze it, isn't a dealbreaker for a horror story, it's still disappointing.
One thing I will say is that it's unique you aren't likely to have encountered another one of these creatures in any other horror novel, that's for sure.


So, between the covers, what we have here is a solid effort by Robbins with a great setting in the smalltown Pacific northwestern region of the United States, a cast of mostlysolid characters, even if some of them mainly the teenagers involved in the Prank Night's Bplot are flat enough to double for posterboard at a moment's notice, and a wellmaintained pace up until the last few pages where it all goes south.
This one reads like a cross between Jaws and a monsteroftheweek episode of The XFiles, and has me excited to read more of Robbins' horror novels and see if he improved.
It appears he left the horror scene all together after's Spook Night, but that leaves six other books in that genre to track down and hopefully enjoy.
Despite my criticism of the ending and the fact we never learn what precisely was carving up the residents of Cemetery Ridge in search of 'sweet nectar', I still enjoyed Prank Night and would recommend it to anyone who's fine with not getting all the details surrounding a Prank Night's creature feature.


Three drained brains out of five,

Best Scene:
Paxton might be an unsympathetic little shit, but at least its a badge he wears proudly.
His ultimate prank is both awful and hilarious at the same time presuming you possess a morbid sense of humor, and there's a part of me that really wanted to see the town's reaction to it, despite his inability to finish it thanks to interference from the monster.
This is exactly the sort of largescale stunt every teenager dreams of pulling off, but fortunately for everyone on the receiving end, it's also virtually impossible barring a specific set of circumstances so you don't need to worry about someone duplicating it.
.