Not the worst of the Buffy tie-ins I've read, but not the best either. It does have a fairly cool villain, this sort of undead pumpkin-headed king who is genuinely creepy - though I'm not sure how much of that creepiness is because I'm inescapably reminded of the wonderfully schlocky Pumpkinhead series of horror films ("Keep away from Pumpkinhead / unless you're tired of living...").

Where it falls down for me is the tone. This is a problem I've noticed in three of the four tie-in novels I've read so far. BtVS has witty dialogue, but it's not a show that has a laugh track popping up every other moment. I often get the feelings that these tie-in novels are written with a laugh track in mind - and typically, they're not nearly as funny as the laugh track would indicate. In fairness, in Halloween Rain this does drop off in the second half, but for me the balance is out in the first. And I'm sorry, informal prose it may be, but lines like "...Willow Rosenberg was every bit as sweet yet, um, inelegant as her name might suggest" are just painful.