Countdown to Halloween Day 26: Goodwill Finds AND Scottie's Books!

Welcome back! So I have been able to hit up a few more Goodwill stores this past weekend so I now have enough posts to get me right to the end of the countdown, and still do my anthology (and other) posts as well! 

So let's take a look at the Halloween goodies I brought home from the Ellsworth store, and then I want to share a handful of books I brought home the same day from Scottie's Books.

Halloween or not, my 6 year old son has been bitten by the Goosebumps bug, and so now any time I see Goosebumps at Goodwill, I pick them up. There never seems to be any lack of Goosebumps at Goodwill, so I think this one will become a running theme over the next few months. What I found particularly funny is that the "Planet of the Lawn Gnomes" book was printed so recently that it is actually promoting the new movie! Someone got done with this book pretty recently. I don't know if that's a glowing endorsement. 

Just in case there was any confusion as to what Goosebumps movie was being promoted on the cover there... 

This is a glow-in-the-dark skeleton hand on a stick, used for pointing. I actually use a dry erase board to teach things at my place of work, so I think the next time I have a class I have to give, I will whip this guy out for effect. 

Once thing gets a good washing, it will be filled with Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I considered Candy Corn but then I remembered...

So peanut butter cups it is! 

I never watched Aah! Real Monsters on Nickelodeon... but I LOVE the concept, and the character designs. So I never pass up a chance to bring something home if it has the characters in or on it. The book, "School Lunch" looks like fun, and I may just read this one to my kids.

I love the look and color of this mask! Had it been yellow instead of green I would be fashioning a Skeletor costume out of it for a party I have to go to on Friday night. Instead I think I'm actually going to go with a different concept, but this thing is gorgeous. I'm actually considering painting it yellow for next year, but I'm not sure I want to risk messing it up.

This little candy dish (pretty sure it was meant to be a coffee mug, bug I am 100% sure the paint is not warm beverage resistant so...) is cute and fun and since I don't have enough witch things in the Halloween collection, I knew she had to come home.

Her goofy, cutie little face is really what sells the whole deal.

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the small pile of books that I picked up at Scottie's books. I've talked about Scottie's here a few times before, and I even sort of began a tradition of looking for books for the Halloween season each year. But alas, alack, Scottie's will be closing its doors for good in just a month or so. ANOTHER USED BOOKSTORE BITES THE DUST. 

But at least I got to pop in there one last time to find some Halloween-y treats before the doors shut for good. The book on the left here is "Whipping Boy" which is a horror novel written by John Byrne. Yes, THAT John Byrne. Comic books John Byrne. And if you look carefully at the blurbs on the cover, you'll see that one of those is by Chris Claremont. Yes THAT Chris Claremont. I don't even remember now what this book is even about. I just knew I WANTED it. The other book, "The Beast Within: A History of the Werewolf" is a history of werewolves. Plain and simple. And I have loved werewolves since I was a kid. So this was a no-brainer. Plus the author's name is Adam Douglas, which is technically NOT Douglas Adams... but is close enough for me to get confused and excited.

Ugh. I hate it when I start editing pictures that I've taken for the blog, and I realize one of them is fuzzier than I originally thought... and I realize that I'm too lazy to actually take another picture of the thing in question. This thing is that thing in question. "Monster Museum" is another one of those oversized Alfred Hitchcock Anthologies. I plan on talking about this particular collection in a later post, so I won't go into great detail now, but I owned it in paperback before I brought this thing home. I LOVE this collection. LOVE IT. And in the next few days, hopefully you will read about all the reasons why this is.

For now, that's all I got folks! I'll be back soon with more Gloomy Goodwill Goodies, but until then, Happy Haunting!

Remember, I'm doing this countdown as a part of the official Countdown to Halloween, so be sure to pop over there and look and see who else is participating this year.

Halloween Countdown Day 18: Scottie's Books Finds!

So last year around this time of year, I went to Scottie's books, a used book store in these here parts, and found a pile of spooky books to share. Well this year, I've done the same thing again! 

Scottie's is just a little more overpriced than I prefer in my used books... but I still like going in there, especially if I'm looking for fun genre books like the ones I'm about to share. Overall the average price of the books I picked up was around 1.50. 

First up, I went looking for anthologies. This was my main goal in going to Scottie's in the first place. Some of my best Halloween-season readings in the past couple of years have been short story collections, and I want to make sure I have a nice pile to choose from for next year. So I picked up three collections in all. Historical Hauntings edited by Jean Rabe and Martin H. Greenberg. I'll be honest, I am probably the least excited by this one, as it focuses mainly on historical figures and time periods. But it promises some stories of vikings, the Civil War, Iwo Jima, Harry Houdini, Jimmy Hoffa, and Helen Keller... so I'll give it a shot. Next we have Peter Straub's Ghosts which is an anthology edited by Straub but has 13 other contributing authors as well. Peter Straub's story "Pork Pie Hat" is actually a really creepy little Halloween story so I thought I'd give this anthology a try. Finally we have Night Visions: In the Blood which is a weird collection (IMO) in that it is a book eidted by Alan Ryan containing three collections of stories from three different authors, Charles L. Grant, Tanith Lee, and Steve Rasnic Tem. This is the book I'm probably the most curious about out of the three.

This book quite possibly has some of the worst illustrations I have ever seen. I am sorry for being so blunt about it, but I honestly think Napoleon Dynamite may have drawn the pictures for this book. Either way, it was super cheap, and it is a collection of monsters from mythology. So I couldn't leave it behind just based on aesthetics unfortunately. 

It wouldn't be a book post without some novelizations and so I picked up these two little gems. The first is Frankenstein: The True Story which turned out NOT to be a novelization but instead the script for the teleplay. So hm. Not sure how I feel about that or if I'll actually read it now. The second is probably one of the more exciting finds of this lot: It Lives Again! which is a novelization of the sequel to the movie "It Lives". It is amazing to me when sequels of obscure horror films get novelizations. It gives me hope for humanity (Not really. Kind of the opposite is true... but I still love this). So many claw-handed babies...

I think my absolute lose-my-s**t moment happened when I found this book however. This is a novelization of not one but TWO of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies together. The Nightmares on Elm Street might not be the most clever title... but I don't love it any less for that. This book incorporates both Part 4: The Dream Master and Part 5: The Dream Child. This makes sense as both of those movies featured Alice as the Final Girl and it follows her out of highschool as a dreamy teen and into her adult life and motherhood. A little disappointing is the fact that the "8 pages of skin-crawling movie photos" only include shots from Part 4, and I would have liked to have seen some shots from Part 5 for sure.

I may be stretching things a bit with this one, but (1.) I always consider pirates a valid part of the Halloween festivities around here and (2.) I couldn't leave this behind, and I didn't want to try to shoehorn it into a different post. So here we are. I find this either hilarious or a little sad because The Druid of Shannara has lettering almost as big as the title, and probably takes up as much space either way. They're really selling the adaptation by TERRY BROOKS more than the movie, Hook.

The final book I brought home I may actually try to read this season before it's too late. Scared Stiff by Jahnna N. Malcolm is one of those cheap-looking Apple Paperbacks from the late 80's to early 90's. This one came out in '91. And it stars a bunch of kids who straight-up have to deal with a walking corpse.

It is probably awful, and if circumstances had played out differently, this would probably have just ended up as one of those filler books for a knock-off Goosebumps-clone-series. But I like the cover art, and the fact that it deals with a real-live dead guy wins my heart. This thing looks like a Ramona book starring a toe-tagged zombie. I can get behind that.

So here's the whole pile I brought home from Scottie's books. If the place is still around again this time next year, I'll go back and do it again. For now though, that's all I have for tonight kids! I'll be back with more Gut-Wrenching Goodwill Goodies soon enough... So until then, Happy Haunting!

Halloween Countdown Day 24: Spooky Books from Scottie's Books!

Today's post is a purchase I made TODAY! I stopped in at a used book store that I don't go to as often as I really should (or as often as I WANT but probably shouldn't...) called "Scottie's Books". It's a cave of a place, with the whole front room literally a chaotic mess of stacked books you have to squeeze past to get to the good stuff that's organized in the back. The guy who runs the place doesn't have letter-head with "Scottie's" on it, but he punches his receipts with this:

Awwwww.... isn't that just the cutest ever? Anyway, I picked up 12 books total at Scottie's and paid a buck for each and every one. I found some REALLY fun stuff there that isn't Halloween themed too... but I'm saving it all for when the countdown is over. Here we go!

First, I found this "Which Way Book" Vampires, Spies, and Alien Beings which is a poor man's "Choose Your Own Adventure" gaming book... and I am just EXACTLY the "poor man" to bring it home! 

Next up is this pretty awesome novelization of a bunch of "Tales from the Crypt" comics for YA readers. The stories themselves are not exactly mild... but they're fun, and snippets of the comic panels are included in each chapter to help illustrate the tales. This is easily one of my favorite finds of the day!

I picked this one up out of sheer nostalgia. It is a Nintendo, Worlds of Power, Castlevania II, Simon's Quest novelization. It's filled with game hints and once upon at time it included a Worlds of Power Trading Card that has long since been torn out. Doesn't get much more Halloween than Castlevania, does it?

Next up is this bizarre illustrated Scooby-Doo novel from 1980. It includes Scrappy-Doo as a character if that gives you any hint as to its quality... When I was a kid I liked Scrappy-Doo quite a lot, but as an adult I find him grating to the point of just not being able to watch the episodes he appears in. This book is bizarre in that the illustrations are all very obviously taken from stock images that look like they came from a coloring book. They all look very stiff and unnatural. 

Next we have the Twilight Zone: The Movie adaptation by Robert Bloch. It's one of those that has a collection of photos from the movie in the middle of the book. This adaptation being written by Robert Bloch is actually pretty hilarious. For instance, Robert Bloch is writing an adaptation of a screen-play by Richard Mattheson... based on a story by Jerome Bixby. The whole book is sort of like that. Each of these stories is filtered through a filter through a filter. But I love the 80's Twilight Zone film, and I love cheesy adaptations of films... so this was sure to come home. 

And last but certainly NOT least are these two collections of essays about Stephen King by various other giants in the industry. I like the idea of a bunch of people writing essays to worship Steve King. All of them brown-nosing their way into getting their thoughts on "The King" published. I find it hilarious actually. And I genuinely hope there are some interesting insights to be read it here as well. 

Well that's it for tonight kids! I hope you're all getting as excited for Halloween as I am! I'll be back soon with some Goosebumpy Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting! 

Be sure to check out all of the great blogs participating in this year's Halloween Countdown! You can do so by clicking this link, or clicking on the Cryptkeeper 2013 banner on the sidebar to the right! Also, check out the "Blog-O-Ween" Halloween Blog collective, again by following this link, or through the badge on the sidebar! Thanks!