The 31 Days of Halloween, Oz Style: Day 25

And we're back to a book that's not only not very good, I'm not even sure why it exists. But Halloween in Oz: Dorothy's Return by Leo Moser and Carol Nelson sure sounds like it should be appropriate, doesn't it? Through a set of circumstances, Dorothy returns to Oz on Halloween, only to find out that Halloween in Oz lasts thirteen nights. There, she meets a boy named Mitt who creates a pumpkin-headed man that he names Punk N. Head to scare his guardian, a witch named Salmanta. Sounding familiar yet? Yes, this is pretty much a retelling of The Marvelous Land of Oz (which I talked about on Day 1 of this series), only with the names changed, extended out to an absurd length, and nowhere near as good. I understand trying to tie Oz and Halloween together (hey, look at me trying to do this fro a whole month), but this is not the way to do it. If the authors somehow thought that Marvelous Land was a forgotten book that they could rewrite to appeal to modern readers, they were sadly mistaken. Their attempts to market this as "the next Harry Potter" were probably doomed from the start. This was also set up to be the start of a series, but this has been out for a decade now with no sequel in sight, so I think this is another failed attempt to start a new Oz series. (There are all kinds of failed attempts at new Oz series out there, in which the creators forget that Oz is not Middle Earth, and Oz books are standalone novels. Needless to say, most of these series never get very far.)