Anyone who has read "The Battle for Christmas" by Stephen Nissenbaum and is looking for a companion book for Halloween...run. This scattered book talks less about the holiday's history than of its contemporary manfestations (both real and imagined). It meanders in all directions indulging more in Skal's peripheral interests like September 11th and gay-pride parades than in uncovered history. Almost as in search for a suitable number of pages, Skal almost endlessly describes the plots of movies we already know and muses so shamelessly about tourist attractions in Salem that it begins to read like an ad for the Visitors Bureau. This is an overwritten introduction for what could have been. Lots of fluff for those of you who don't want too much information muddying up that slick cover.