HALLOWEEN NIGHT

Using a color scheme heavy on orange and black, along with plenty of glaring eyes and eerie silhouettes, McCauley creates the right atmosphere for this uneven gathering of verse. Some entries, such as “The Two-Headed Ghoul” (“It’s getting close, don’t make it mad, / Here it comes—it’s Mom and Dad!”), and a gleeful visit to a “Haunted House,” are crowd-pleasers, but there’s a moralistic streak to sentiments like, “I’d rather be kooky than spooky,” and a poem about the perils of greed titled “Sick or Treat.” Several selections are only tangentially Halloweenish (“I would like a monster pet, / The kind that children never get”), and others seem dropped into the mix haphazardly, such as one ending with “Halloween is on the way!” that would have been better placed at the beginning than midway through. Still, the collection’s perennially popular theme and evocative look should earn it a try, where budgets permit. (Poetry. 7-10)