"It's just a bunch of hocus pocus." Yeah, I know. I know that line. You know that line. Everyone who's ever been within 50 feet of a TV in October knows that line. And honestly, hearing it read aloud in an audiobook novelization of a movie I've watched probably 30+ times hit different than I expected — somewhere between nostalgic comfort food and the distinct feeling of reading someone else's fan wiki summary of a film you already have memorized.
I grabbed this one on a whim during the week before Halloween. Kevin and I were carving pumpkins (his looked like a distributed systems architecture diagram, mine looked like a pumpkin, we're both proud), and I figured — hey, 11 and a half hours of Sanderson sisters content for my commute week? Seasonal. Festive. Why not.
The Novelization Half Is Basically a Git Diff of Your Memories
The first half of this book is a straight retelling of the 1993 movie. And look, A.W. Jantha does a competent job of translating screen to page, but there's this weird structural thing where some scenes read like a movie script — almost shot-by-shot description of blocking and camera angles — and then it snaps back into prose-novel mode. One of the negative reviews I saw nailed it: "a lousy way to write like a movie script with one of the scenes, then go to writing like a book." That whiplash is real. It's like reading code that alternates between two completely different style guides with no linter.
The thing that bugged me most? The musical moments. The movie lives and dies on Bette Midler belting "I Put a Spell on You" at that Halloween party. In the audiobook, Eileen Stevens doesn't sing it. She just... narrates around it. Which — okay, I get it, she's not Bette Midler, nobody's asking her to be. But that scene is the centerpiece of the film, and without the music, it lands with all the impact of a console.log in production. You notice the absence.
Poppy's Story: When the Sequel Tries Too Hard to npm update
The second half — the actual new sequel content with Max and Allison's daughter Poppy — is where things get interesting. And by "interesting" I mean "unevenly interesting." Jantha clearly wanted to modernize the franchise, and there are moments where that works. The Salem setting gets fleshed out more, there's a new generation dynamic that has potential. But the book keeps reaching for trendy references and humor that already felt dated by the time I was listening to it, and this was written in 2018. It's the literary equivalent of a tech company putting a ping pong table in the office and calling it culture. Silverthorn has a similar problem — a sequel trying so hard to expand on beloved source material that it loses the original's charm in the process.
The jokes repeat. The Sanderson sisters' shtick — which works in 96 minutes of film because Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy have insane comedic timing — gets stretched thin over hours of prose. Without the physical comedy and those specific performances, a lot of the humor just... sits there. Winifred's verbal tics become repetitive rather than funny. And there's a new character that a bunch of listeners found genuinely annoying, and I can't say they're wrong — the kind of character who exists to explain the modern world to the witches, which was already done better in the original movie with a bus driver and a guy in a devil costume.
Eileen Stevens Does What She Can
Stevens is an Earphones Award winner and she's clearly a pro — the narration is clean, her pacing is solid, she keeps things moving. But the material doesn't give her much to work with in terms of vocal range. There's no moment where she disappears into a character the way, say, Ray Porter disappears into a Bobiverse POV. (Sorry, I'll stop comparing everything to Ray Porter. No I won't.) She's reading competently from a book that's fighting with its own identity. The audio production is straightforward — no sound effects, no music, just Stevens and the text. For a property that's SO much about atmosphere and camp, that stripped-down approach feels like a missed opportunity.
At 1.5x this clocked in at about 7.5 hours for me. Honestly, at 1.75x it would've been fine too — the prose isn't dense enough to lose anything at speed.
Who Gets Value Here (And Who Should Just Rewatch the Movie)
If you're a die-hard Hocus Pocus fan who wants every piece of extended universe content — you'll get something out of this. The sequel half does add genuine lore and there's a version of this story that could've really sung (pun intended). If you're a casual fan looking for a Halloween listen? Just rewatch the movie. The ROI on this audiobook is low when the source material is streaming everywhere.
Perfect for: background Halloween vibes while decorating. Skip for: anyone expecting the energy of the film.
Commute-Worthiness: A 6AM Shrug
I didn't regret listening to it. I also didn't text Kevin about it once, which is my real metric for whether a book lands. It's a perfectly fine seasonal palette cleanser between heavier listens, but it's the audiobook equivalent of candy corn — you grab a handful because it's October, not because it's actually good.
