All Hallows' Eve by Charles Williams: Chapter by Chapter

Chapter I

(aka Haibane-Renmei meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Good Version.)

'On that apparent bridge, beneath those apparent stars, she stood up and she knew it....Her heart had not [before] fallen--ever, ever--through an unfathomed emptiness, supported only on the fluttering wings of everyday life; and not even realizing that it was so supported. She was a quite ordinary, and rather lucky, girl and she was dead.'

WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN

(Now we know where Nasu got it, whatever 'it' is.)



Chapter II

We meet our villain, Simon Leclerc (a popular evangelist from the United States, OH LOVE), through a, um...through an unflattering portrait of him that other characters sit around arguing over. Yeah. Really.

WELL-PLAYED, WILLIAMS. WELL-PLAYED.

Chapter III

Charles, honey, we need to talk.

This isn't bad, exactly (okay, it is kind of bad but not really fatal), but it does need to be addressed. See...reading your book, I understand why you feel it necessary to play up the Jewishness of the main antagonist. I understand the historical points you're trying to make and I understand what sorts of tensions playing out in 1940s Britain you were trying to tap into. But I understand these things because I know about how those tensions worked, I went into All Hallows' Eve with the knowledge that there were both occult and mundane reasons for this writing decision, and I've read 'The Coming of Palomides' and thus know that in life you really did try to avoid racefail. Other people, Charles, usually don't know these things, and no matter how complex and intertextual a role a villain's ethnicity plays in a story, they're going to look askance at you for bringing it up unless you're writing Magneto. So basically, I understand why you felt the need to write Simon Leclerc the way you did, but I really wonder if it really would have been that hard to make him simply an American cult leader, rather than a Jewish-American cult leader.

Yours,
Nathan.

Chapter IV

This chapter focuses on the previously peripheral character of Betty Wallingford. Like Lester and Evelyn, she's a young woman of an unclear age, definitely somewhere between twenty and twenty-five. Unlike them, she is still alive, and quite a miserable life it is. Her (adopted) mother, the wife of the Air Chief Marshal Sir Bartholomew Wallingford, treats her, very literally, like a servant, doing things like forcing her to only listen to vapid pop music because it's what girls 'of her station' are supposed to like. She constantly calls Betty stupid and explicitly sets out to cause her pain for her own amusement. One wonders why Lady Wallingford even adopted her, until one finds out that it's because the book's resident evil American cult/magic huckster is using Betty as a medium, sending her into Heaven to see the future for him and then forcibly dragging her back out against her will. Basically, Betty is a total 'OH POOR BABY' character and I want to hug her.

The last part of the chapter returns to our dead girls, and cements (as if this needed any more cementing) that Lester is the Mamiina and Evelyn is the Rodoreamon in this relationship. They see Betty but she's dragged back out to the waking world before they can come into proper contact, after which Lester gets pissed and goes to haunt Lady Wallingford or something.

I don't know why, but I'm finding this book much more compelling than Descent into Hell.

Chapter V

Here there's an interaction between Richard and Simon over what's going on with Jonathan. This is interesting to me mainly because it reveals two things:

1. Simon is actually an 'anti-Jew', whatever that is supposed to mean. I guess it means that he's a deliberate parody and perversion of the OH MY GOD IT'S THE EVIL JEWS archetype (both in-universe and on the part of the author), not that the idea is not a parody of itself already. I suppose this is better than if Williams had actually seriously bought into this shit, but I still don't see why it's necessary.
2. Simon is Betty's father. Squick is involved. I don't wish to discuss this any further.

The other big revelation, which comes at the end of the chapter, is that Evelyn is evil. Really really fucking evil. Holy crap. I was NOT expecting that.

...I guess this means that she's not a very good Rodoreamon equivalent after all?
Chapter VI

Reading this chapter with the Fictional Lesbianism Goggles set to Full is fuuuuunnnn. Lester Furnival's feelings for Betty Wallingford are explicitly compared to her feelings for her husband, she's established as canonically bisexual in a strange line similar in its deliberate homoerotic pseudo-crypticness to the 'men may love men and women may love women and still speak and have voices' line in Descent into Hell, and they have a reconciliation that contains the line 'Only Betty mattered and Betty lay without sign' and 'Her dreams of a god had vanished among those too certain visions of a girl; she wholly forgot the appearance [of the villain] on the stairs in her desperate sense of Betty'.

This chapter also addresses the 'Evelyn is really really fucking evil' plot point from the other side, the side that shows Evelyn actually turning to Hell. When Crowley in Good Omens 'sauntered vaguely downwards' rather than falling it was presented as a step in the right direction; here, Evelyn Mercer sauntering vaguely downwards is fucking chilling.

My mental image of Lester changed completely in this chapter. She's still definitely a Mamiina-type character, but now she's like Mamiina after she stops being a bitch.

Chapter VII

'God help Father Simon if he tries to control Lester.'

'God help Father Simon if he tries to control Lester.'

LESTER FURNIVAL: BADASS LADY. IT'S OFFICIAL.

Also:

'Betty had indeed spoken a word, as a sleeper does, murmuring it. She had said, in a sleepy repetition of her last waking and loving thought: 'Lester!''

TOTALLY NOT GAY YOU GUYS.

Chapter VIII

Lester and Betty are in love, film at eleven.

In this chapter Lester and Evelyn are both manipulated into a position in which they end up having to share a body, a homuncula that Simon makes out of Portland cement clinker, his own saliva, and 'an imitation of fire' (I'm not actually making any of these ingredients up). We're treated to a vision of the past and future of London, more proof that Evelyn really is an incredibly nasty and spiteful bitch, and this lovely sentence:

In this City lay all--London and New York, Athens and Chicago, Paris and Rome and San Francisco and Jerusalem; it was that to which they led in the lives of their citizens.

Two chapters left!! Will Lester and Betty be able to prevent Simon from fusing with his two clones in Russia and China and TAKING OVER THE WORLD (OF COURSE!!!)? Will Richard and Jonathan finally get a room? Will it become any more obvious (as if that's possible) how much of an influence this was on the Nasuverse? Stay tuned to find out!

Chapter IX

Things are getting ugly for both our heroes and our villains. Betty has left her mother's house to live with Jonathan, Richard is also living with Jonathan because the flat that he shared with his dead wife now depresses him, Lady Wallingford is getting drunk and depressed, the Foreign Office is in on the conspiracy to, essentially, give the world to Simon in the vain hope that he'll leave them the fuck alone afterwards...oh, and Lester has to share an artificial body with Evelyn. Simon may be the most evil character in this story but Evelyn is by far the most annoying.

Anyway, the four main good guys (plus Evelyn) are now all together for the first time and going to confront Simon at his compound near Holborn. One chapter left, in which I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Lester and Betty probably defeat Simon with their love.

Also, Betty explicitly says that Lester is 'like [her fiancee] to [her]'.

Chapter X

The love of the four amigos--Lester, Betty, Jonathan, and Richard--transcends space and allows the heavenly City to break through into the earthly. Evelyn's bullshit is stopped, and Simon and his doppelgangers are destroyed, by a deluge of autumn rain magically enhanced by a miracle. Lester and Evelyn go to their respective Heavens...but Evelyn's Heaven looks an awful lot like Hell. Promising to be with Betty and Richard always, Lester fades away in the hall by Holborn. The Foreign Office is not going to put up with cultic crap any more, and Betty carries forth a blessing of healing to fix whatever it was that Simon was tryng to do to the supernatural world.

All Hallows' Eve is finished now. It's really, actually finished. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that, even though it's not a particularly long book. I would recommend it to anybody who would be able to keep 1940s attitudes towards history enough in mind to get past some fo the unsavoury aspects of Simon's backstory. And pay close attention to the lovely lyrical writing in the remarkable climax [and the specific acts of Betty's mother, fiancee, and girlfriend], which, if you aren't familiar with it already, is so good that I don't dare spoil it.