Diabolically Delish: Extreme Halloween: The Ultimate Guide to Making Halloween Scary Again by Tom Nardone

What would Halloween be if not for the extreme genius of Tom Nardone? Having come up with seemingly every devilishly delightful thing to do with a pumpkin in his best-selling Extreme Pumpkins: Diabolical Do-It-Yourself Designs to Amuse Your Friends and Scare Your Neighbors and his sequel Extreme Pumpkins II: Take Back Halloween and Freak Out a Few More Neighbors, (see my posts here,) in his newest, Extreme Halloween: The Ultimate Guide to Making Halloween Scary Again, our Halloween hero zooms his focus out to include all things spooky--extreme yard tricks and plenty of extreme craftings that turn any house or garage into a haunted house.

Outdoors there is plenty to amuse the neighbors and approaching trick or treaters--skull trees, hand-hammered wooden caskets, ghosts that seem to float and swoop down zip lines, porch scarecrows and ghouls, graveyards concocted from mulch, pumpkin heads, stuffed gloves, shoes, and other castoff clothing, and door decor with a surprise for those intrepid souls who dare to get that far.

Inside the house are cool ghoul food, bleeding baked goods, the toilet candy bowl, and other plentiful recipes for creepy comestibles. Then there is "the haunted lavatory," complete with skull soap, the terrifying toilet (Don't ask!), and the shadowy hangman in the shower. Inventive costume ideas abound, with hilarious suggestions for outfitting those lame guests who come cluelessly unadorned with the proper garb.

Nardone doesn't neglect his first love, the jack-o'-lantern, in this new book, however. There are flaming pumpkin heads (Caution: Warn Fire Department Before Using), graveyard jacks, pumpkin-head millipedes, and many other silly-spooky squash creations.

No library or ghostly trickster should be without these three handsome Halloween standbys, ghoulishly gigglesome, horrifically hilarious, and tantalizingly terrifying as Halloween itself should be.