Kunstler's Halloween Ball

James Howard Kunstler made his mark with 1993’s The Geography of Nowhere, which I put up there with Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a seminal manifesto on our built environment. He subsequently wrote some other nonfiction books on the same topic and I found him to be a compelling writer and speaker. But by the time he wrote his World Made by Hand post-apocalyptic novel series, we had become a peak-oil doomer. I found him such a compelling thinker about the built environment that I gave him the benefit of the doubt as he pushed the limits of credulity with the doomism. But he’s really gone too far in recent years as a conspiracy theorist when it comes to the events of Trump’s election and the Covid pandemic.

Before the Geography of Nowhere, Kunstler published several novels but never gained notoriety as an author. Having really enjoyed the World Made by Hand series, I picked up his novel The Halloween Ball, and heck, it is pretty good.

The Halloween Ball captures urban decline, the popularity of cocaine, and the implications of the deinstitutionalization of mentally ill in an upstate New York college town in the 1980s. It covers the sundry mix of coeds and townies on Halloween Day, as they push through a fog of misfortune and dubious choices.

The writing is smart and solid. The characters have depth and and the story arc is good. Published just six years before The Geography of Nowhere, the characters are conscious of the built environment and the evolving fate of the upstate region’s cities. It was a satisfying read and I may try another Kunstler novel.