The Pumpkin Smasher, by Anita Benarde (pub. 1972)
Amazon; B&N; Goodreads

This was originally published three years before I was born, but I don't think I ever heard of it until 2017, when Entertainment Weekly had a little article about it in their Halloween issue. So in 2018, I got a copy and read it on Halloween. It's a shame there can be no nostalgic value in it, for me. And I'm a bit disappointed that I didn't really care about the story one way or the other. It was okay, I guess, for a children's picture book, but not something that particularly spoke to me, in any way. And I feel bad about that.

Anyway, it's about a town where everyone loves Halloween, but one year, they find that all the Jack-o-Lanterns have been smashed overnight. It happens again the next couple of years. Finally they're on the brink of cancelling Halloween altogether, but a couple of kids come up with a plan to thwart the pumpkin smasher. And I guess that's all I want to say, except that of course it has a happy ending.