Spooks, ghosts, skeletons, you know the whole Halloween kit and caboodle—frankly, I’ve always been a fan. Butterfinger Smooth And Crunchy Peanut Butter Cups Skulls utilizes one of solidest tropes: the skull. Two surprisingly hefty ones of ‘em per package. While the Capuchin catacombs of Rome (human hip bones splayed out like cocktail napkins on the wall, alters of femurs) are a bit much to my sensibilities, I cannot lie, Halloween or nay, I do like me a memento mori. And while I can’t say skulls are, like, my thing, if you will, as a real sock-in-the-teeth reminder of the inevitability of death—well, they’re hard to beat. My favorite painting right now is “The Triumph of Death” by William Beard and the only way you could improve it is if you slathered a Butterfinger Smooth and Crunchy Peanut Butter over the painting’s skull.

What’s even better about these particular skulls, and probably why I reached for them in the first place, is not only are they skulls, but as the death-blow to the cranium suggests, they are murdered skulls (or I ‘spose the skull of a murdered candyman: Wonka remains, after all, the worst kind of supervillain). Butterfinger double-downed. Oh, sure, it could have been an accident, or the effect of rotting in a grave before rising to freak you the f out. Yet forensically speaking, in candy terms—we are looking at murder.

It’s a good skull, scary, murdered, mean-laughing (at your inevitable doom?), and rather more metal or biker than that band I cannot stop myself from disparaging. You know the one. A few millimeters more on the bigly-proportioned eyes and it might have edged into Area 51. I’m just as glad it doesn’t.

In any case, looking at it, I have to say, you get the feeling as if you knew the back story on this skull you would not be entirely surprised it had died a violent death. Or, if you feeling were victim-blame-y, you might even secretly wonder if it had it coming. In any case you do know this: there will be no justice for this skull. It will decompose in the shallow grave of your mouth.

Now, many people eat many dead things. There are dishes made up of the four-and-two footed/finned that don’t hedge from or even highlight said deadness (big fried google-eyed carp, for example). But I can’t think of that many foods we eat regularly that the corpseness is upped into memento mori. I mean a roasted pig, sure—but stuffed inside a loaf of bread, sweet potato, or coffin? Or a traditional French cake decorated to look someone on their deathbed? Meatloaf skulls? I haven’t seen it.  

I’ve a suspicion that despite the universality of the human death ugh/eek factor, there’s something Northern/Western hemisphere-y required for the iconography of Butterfinger Smooth and Crunchy Peanut Butter Cups Skulls to work. I wonder if other places—Chad, Malaysia, Bhutan, New Guinea, Tajikistan—they might translate into totally hilarious (not scary), unfathomable (wha?), despicable (seditiously unserious)—but lord knows.

To the brass tacks: texture and taste. First the paradoxical claim is not an untruth: it IS both smooth and crunchy. The smoothness has a weird mouth feel. This smoothness is in fact so acute as to seem a little hoodwinking, like the silky goodbyes of a ne’er-do-well charmer leaving the house with your wallet. The crunchy is a bit smothered and exists more like little crunch flakes or crystals than something more texturally substantial. Maybe this has to do with some essential globness at work. It took me a week to get through both Butterfinger Smooth and Crunchy Peanut Butter Cup Skulls, which could be misinterpreted as a delicacy of appetite, but no, I just needed a breather now and again. Maybe it was less the sum of its hybridized parts, as the Butterfinger and peanut butter were both dimmed, and produced an effect I found a little gustatorily confusing. Still, while the smoothness…lingers…if you like candy, and don’t need fancy pants candy, they are perfectly pleasing.

I’d recommend ‘em but as an object of contemplation or a snack, it’s a little hard to say.

Oh.

And we’re all gonna die .

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