Pumpkin Guts: The Hellbound Halloween
Jacoby A. Matott
North Street Book Prize 2025 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Graphic Novel & Memoir
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Pumpkin Guts: The Hellbound Halloween, written and illustrated by Jacoby A. Matott, is a colorfully grotesque graphic novel that pays homage to teen slasher movies, with sassy characters who crack jokes about the tropes that they're reenacting. (The one Black teen, for instance, decides to nope out of the adventure early on, knowing that such movies treat the token minority sidekick as disposable!)
The characters' names also include homages to legendary figures in horror cinema. Protagonist Nancy Neve Langencampbell's moniker is a mash-up of actresses Neve Campbell from the Scream movie franchise and Heather Langencamp who played "Nancy" in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Her pals' names reference actors Vincent Price and Lon Chaney, directors Wes Craven and John Carpenter, and probably others that I didn't catch. These Easter eggs give the book a playful undercurrent that reassures the reader when the action gets bloody. The prime balancing act of horror media is this back-and-forth between believable scares and the escape hatch of knowing that it's fantasy. Pumpkin Guts performs this trick very well.
The plot is straight out of pulp fiction, yet the story has emotional weight for the same reason as a good Stephen King gore-fest: likeable characters with relatable stakes. A close-knit high school friend group, banned from the Halloween dance by their grouchy teacher (Breakfast Club vibes!), try to have a special evening together at the carnival, knowing that graduation will soon separate them. One of them, Nancy, is also grieving her grandfather's recent death. Halloween was their special holiday. Meanwhile, a homicidal escaped convict is on the loose, seeking an artifact that will turn him back into the immortal Lord Hallowe'en, an evil sorcerer with links to the holiday's origins.
When Lord Hallowe'en makes the carnival attractions horribly real, Nancy and her friends must defeat him before his reign becomes permanent. Much blood is spilled in creative ways, Nancy learns about grandpa's demon-fighting past, and teen romance blossoms, of course. (But not for Nancy, who comes out as asexual—a nice update of genre tropes for the 21st century.) Though I felt that the violent episodes became repetitive and excessive after awhile, they were, if I dare to pun, well-executed.
The book's saturated palette, dominated by orange, purple, and neon green, resembles 1980s lurid comics such as Tales from the Crypt. The consistent color story compensates for variations in the style of artwork, a quirk that Matott acknowledges in the afterword as the result of developments in his style over the decade it took to complete this ambitious project.
The physical book looks and feels professional, with a high-quality hardcover and dust jacket and bright illustrations on sturdy paper. I especially appreciated the clear lettering in a traditional comic-book all-caps font. Hat tips to colorist Andrew Walde and letterer Keith Gleason. Pumpkin Guts belongs in the window of your favorite indie comics store!
Read an excerpt from Pumpkin Guts (PDF)
Buy this book at BookBaby.
