Long Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas

Long Live the Pumpkin Queen (August 2020) by Shea Ernshaw is a young adult fantasy and a sequel to the 1993 animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas directed by Henry Selick (screenplay by Caroline Thompson, story by Tim Burton). The author is a winner of the Oregon Book Award, and her books have frequently been selected as “Indie Next Picks.” Her first book, The Wicked Deep (2018), was a New York Times bestseller, and her third book, A History of Wild Places, was a Book-of-the-Month selection

Page numbers in this guide refer to the Kindle ebook edition.

Plot Summary

Sally the ragdoll has loved Jack Skellington for as long as she can remember. After saving Jack (and Christmas) from the near disaster caused by his impulsive attempt to co-opt Christmas, Sally has won his heart, and they are married, but Sally worries that she does not know how to be a queen. Sally and Jack spent their honeymoon in Valentine Town. Sally feels especially insecure after meeting Ruby Valentino, the queen of Valentine Town, who seems impossibly perfect.

When Sally and Jack return to Halloween Town, Jack is immediately caught up in the preparations for Halloween, which is only two weeks away. The Vampire Prince and the Witch Sisters sweep Sally away and start pinning her into an uncomfortable dress, criticizing her hair, clothes, and posture. Sally flees to Jack for help, but he is preoccupied and can only tell her that whatever kind of queen she wants to be will be perfect.

Escaping to the woods with the ghost dog Zero, Sally returns to the holiday grove. She considers going to Valentine Town to ask Queen Ruby for advice, but she hears Zero barking deeper in the woods. Investigating, she finds an overgrown door with a crescent moon sign on it. She opens the door and is about to fall through when Zero grabs her arm and pulls her back. Her arm tears away from her shoulder. Forgetting the door, Sally chases Zero back to the cemetery. She finally retrieves her arm, sews it back on, and then falls asleep.

When she wakes, Sally finds Halloween Town perfectly quiet. Every one of the residents she encounters is sound asleep, including Jack, and they are all dusted with fine sand. Sally decides to brew a potion to wake Jack. When she reaches the street, however, she hears a sound and sees an old man with a long beard floating toward her with sand spilling from his pockets. Terrified, Sally recoils until he passes. Careful not to be seen by the old man, Sally gathers the ingredients necessary for her potion. She tries the finished potion on Jack, but it fails to wake him.

Sally hears the old man crooning a lullaby outside on the street. He sees her through the window and blows a handful of sand over her. Sally coughs but doesn’t fall asleep. She tries to escape the house and runs to the holiday grove, then past it, looking for the tree with the crescent moon on the door, thinking it would be a good place to hide. When she reaches it, she finds the door open and realizes that she forgot to close it; she must have let the old man out. If so, then what happened to Halloween Town is her fault.

Sally decides to seek help in one of the other holiday towns, starting with Valentine Town. She finds everyone asleep. Sally tries Christmas Town, Easter Town, Thanksgiving Town, and Fourth of July Town. She doesn’t find anyone awake until she reaches St. Patrick’s Town. There she meets a leprechaun, who tells her that the door she opened leads to Dream Town, one of the ancient realms, and the old man is the Sandman. Sally begs him to help her. He refuses but gives her a four-leaf clover for luck.

Sally’s only chance to stop the Sandman and save all the worlds is to go to Dream Town and see if she can find someone there to help her. The residents of Dream Town are awake. They all wear pajamas and are working in the town's fields, harvesting lavender. Sally tries to ask them for help, but their answers are all in poems or riddles that make no sense to her. Sally takes the path to the high castle walls. Entering, she sits down on a bench outside the library. A little boy brings her a note telling her to go to the governor’s house.

At the governor’s house, Sally meets Greta and Albert, who are rag dolls like herself. They tell her she is their long-lost daughter who was stolen from them by Doctor Finkelstein when she was 12. They offer to show her around Dream Town, but Sally remembers Jack and all the other people asleep in all the holiday worlds. She asks Greta and Albert to help her stop the Sandman. They tell her how the Sandman was once the king of Dream Town, but he was a monster, greedily putting people to sleep and stealing all their dreams. A hundred years ago, the people of Dream Town built a wall around the town to keep him out. Now that Sally has opened the door from the grove, they intend to chop down all the trees so that he can never get back in, and the town will be safe from him forever.

Sally protests that they must stop the Sandman before he gets into the human world and puts everyone to sleep there. Her parents tell Sally to rest; they will wait to cut down the trees until the next day. In her room, Sally finds a book about sleep under her bed. She reads about dream sand and the Sandman and realizes she knows how to stop him; trying to wake up his victims won’t work. She has to brew a potion strong enough to put the Sandman to sleep, then everyone else should wake up. The problem is that she can only get the ingredients in Halloween Town. She has to get back there. Looking out the window, she sees her parents and the villagers going toward the grove armed with axes.

Sally finds she has been locked in her room and must wait until she can get someone to open her door. When she finally does, she is too late. All the trees in the grove have been cut down, and Sally has no way home. Sally shouts at her parents that they have betrayed and lied to her, and she knows how to stop the Sandman, but they have guaranteed that everyone in all the worlds will be trapped in dreamless deathlike sleep forever.

Her parents tell her they only wanted to make sure she would stay with them, but they realize now that they were wrong. There is still one way she can get back to Halloween Town. A door in the library will let her out into a library anywhere in the human world. Then all she has to do is find a cemetery and use that to get back to the graveyard in Halloween Town. If she does, however, she will never be able to come back; they will have to destroy the door in the library to prevent the Sandman from returning to Dream Town.

The door in the library admits Sally into the library at Buckingham Palace, where she finds that the Sandman has already been to the human world. She finds her way to the nearest cemetery and steps through a door in a mausoleum and into the cemetery in Halloween Town.

Sally gathers the herbs she needs for her potion. Jack is still asleep with Zero the ghost dog watching over him. Sally brews the strongest sleeping potion she can. Next, she sews six life-sized rag dolls to use as decoys. She sets the rag dolls up all over town to distract the Sandman long enough for her to get to the fountain at the town square. While the enraged Sandman destroys the dolls one at a time, Sally reaches the fountain and tips the poison into the water.

The Sandman destroys the last of the decoys, then comes for Sally. He stops at the fountain's edge and asks who she is and why his dream sand doesn’t work on her. She tells him she is the queen of Halloween Town, but she was born in Dream Town. While the Sandman is distracted, Zero sneaks up behind him and knocks him into the poisoned fountain, where he falls asleep and sinks under the water. At that moment, everyone in the town begins to wake up. Sally rushes to Jack’s side.

When he wakes, she tells him everything that has happened. He first wants to see the world where she was born. They go through the grove to the crescent moon tree, but when they open the door, it is just a dead hollow tree. They return to Halloween Town, and as they pass through the cemetery, the mausoleum door opens, and Sally’s parents step out. They tell Sally they couldn’t bear to lose her again, so they convinced the people of Dream Town to wait until they had a chance to find Sally and help her subdue the Sandman.

They arrive back at the village square just as the Sandman wakes up. He is astonished to wake up and remember his own dreams. He has never slept or had a dream of his own before. It makes him feel quite cheerful. He apologizes for getting carried away. He promises never to steal another dream as long as Sally keeps supplying him with her sleeping potion.

Jack banishes Doctor Finkelstein from Halloween Town. The whole town pulls together and finishes the Halloween preparations just in time for the holiday. Sally designs her crown and reigns by Jack’s side as the Pumpkin Queen of Halloween Town.