Countdown to Halloween Day 21: Anthologies - Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark... And More!

Welcome back kids and kid-ettes! Today I'm taking a look at a tried-and-true classic series of anthology story books: The "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" series by Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell!

You remember these. Don't chew your fingernails and shuffle your feet and shake your head sheepishly no. I KNOW YOU REMEMBER THESE. All who have been children at some point remember these books. We fought over who got to take them home from the library at school. We loved looking at the pictures very briefly, and then flipping past the pictures as quickly as we could... so the pictures didn't see us back. Unless... we spent time just sitting and staring at the details of the pictures, letting each one corrupt our sanity just a smidge more.

Oh yeah, and there were stories in the books too. Like stories you could read.

It all started back in 1981 with this first book, "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark," which combines urban legends, ghost stories, and creepy folktales collected and retold by Alvin Schwartz with drawings by Stephen Gammell (as you can see on the cover, obviously. Not even sure why I typed all that out, honestly...). I can tell you from experience that kids were probably not picking up these books for Schwartz's gripping storytelling prowess. To be as respectful as I can, but still stay honest too, I don't think the writing is all that special here. Schwartz does a manageable job of recounting the stories... but not much else. There isn't much "scary" to his scary stories. With a different storytelling slant, that could have been much different. 

No, when we bought a ticket to this show, it was to see the horrific illustrations by Stephen Gammell. I honestly cannot FATHOM what the publishers were thinking. Such illustrations would never even be considered for a children's book these days. On the other hand, I have a deep, genuine love for these books and their contents that stems from being messed up by them so thoroughly as a kid. 

My youngest kids however, will not know that particular joy for a few more years yet. I don't remember how old my daughter was when she first encountered this book, but I DO remember the night that followed as we had a very scared little girl crying in her bed and telling us she couldn't get those pictures out of her eyes... which is kind of a creepy idea for a story in and of itself... but I digress. That was a parenting lesson. 

But you look at the pictures I collected just for this post and you get the idea. 

It really isn't the stories themselves. Stories like "The Haunted House," or "The Girl Who Stood on a Grave," or "The Hook," or "The Babysitter," have the potential to be scary, but not the way Schwartz tells them. There is no atmosphere, no spookiness, just a flat kind of rote repetition of story points and details that each have a beginning, middle, and end. If these stories had been published either without illustrations at all, or even with milder, less terrifying ones, we would have no memory of these books at all. This is demonstrated very clearly by the newer editions of these books that include illustrations by the very talented Brett Helquist. The illustrations are very capable and accomplished... but they are NOT of the same creepy caliber as Stephen Gammell for making these stories truly "scary." 

What's strange is that I barely remember the second book at all. It came out in 1984, and I actually had it confused with the 3rd book, which didn't come out until 7 years later, but which I remember much clearer, even though I would have been 13 when it came out. 

What surprised me about it now is that the pictures are much more tame feeling in this one, like Gammell really toned down the squishy-wet gore and the twisty-dry bone feeling of the first book. There are still small measures of it here or there, but most of the illustrations are of landscapes, animals, faces, and even what feels like a few surrealist pieces thrown in for atmosphere alone. Yes, they are eerie and yes there are still a few examples of skeletons or severed limbs in the book, but even these feel muted vs. the original book. 

I'm not sure if this was a publisher's mandate or some sort of self-censorship on Gammell's part, but I think this is the main reason the book stand out less in my mind. It just doesn't have the same sort of bite to it as the first collection. The stories on the other hand? They seem more edgy and dangerous here. Schwartz still has a bit of a dry storytelling style here, but he seems to know how to end his stories a little better this time around. The stories themselves feel a little... meaner too maybe? The story of "The Drum" really stands out to me as a particularly weird one. It doesn't really get creepy until the very end, but boy it really takes the wind out of your sails fast! The storycraft itself doesn't really get much better, but it feels like Schwartz is genuinely trying here to up his game by choosing even darker tales, and having more ambiguity in his endings.

I have no idea why such a huge gap came between books 2 and 3 in this series, but we jump 7 years from 1984 to 1991 and suddenly Gammell is back to full nightmare fuel mode.

We're a out of the early 80's and into the early 90's and the gore and thanatophilia are back baby! Look at the spiders and blood EXPLODING from that horrified girl's face! This book has scarecrows made of stitched up flesh, giant-headed flying monsters with oozing eyeballs, skeletal horses, and the most messed up looking "Mexican hairless sewer rat" that you've ever seen. The really creepy ones aren't that overt though. The strange, doughy, smiling woman with long lanky black hair, or the ghost that looks like a paper doll with its center scooped out... those are the pictures that really give me the heebie-jeebies.

Schwartz gives us kind of a mixed bag of stories here. We get almost as many "just plain weird" stories as we do truly "scary" ones. But almost all are fun to read. 

I picked up this collected edition of the books a while back, but found that I really missed owning the three individual volumes too. So now I have them all! Of course, I have to keep the cover of this book hidden most of the time, because I'm afraid it will creep out my kids. That does it for the "Scary Stories" books (for this post anyway... they will live on in our imagination FOREVER) but I have 2 more books to share, one involving Schwartz and one involving Gammell.

The first one is "In a Dark, Dark Room," by Schwartz, but this time with illustrations by Dirk Zimmer. This book hold a place of very early equal regard in my heart as the "Scary Stories" series, because it almost feels like it's a younger cousin to those books. Schwarz did another one of these "I Can Read" books with illustrator Victoria Chess, called simply "Ghosts!" but I've never really been a fan of that one for some reason.

Now, Dirk Zimmer is no Stephen Gammell. Let's get that out of the way up front... but he is his own brand of weird and disturbing to be sure. I couldn't really look at books that had been illustrated by Zimmer later on in childhood because I had such strong associations between this book and his style.

The stories are fairly tame... but not SUPER tame considering this book is really aimed at first-through-third graders.  We have talking corpses, long-fanged stranger danger, a woman's head abruptly falls off, and the book ends with a large, rather menacing looking skeleton. So again, it really is the work of the illustrator, this time again, to scare the kiddies. Maybe mot on the same scale as Gammell's work above... but it get's the job done. And speaking of Gammell...

Last Halloween I was thrilled to discover there was a book of Halloween poetry that existed that had been illustrated by Stephen Gammell, that seemed to be done in exactly the same style as the "Scary Story" books. And man, do I LOVE ME SOME HALLOWEEN POETRY.

It's a collection put together by Myra Cohn Livingston in 1989, and Gammell is at it right out of the gate! You can't even get pas the contents page without seeing a skull clown! (If that's meant to be a clown... it may just be a big, gross nose hole... either way, brrrr...)

There's a really nice assortment of poetry here, and Gammell's illustration do their job well. There are really only maybe three truly "scary" illustrations (I've included two of those here)  while the rest are just sort of off-putting. If you're a fan of Halloween poetry, or Gammell's illustrations, this is worth tracking down for sure. It is out of print, but you can find it on various online secondhand vendors as I did. I think I found mine in a store on Amazon.

Well that's it kids! Hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane... Hope you sleep well tonight! Heh. I'll be back soon with some Ghastly Goodwill Goodies! 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.

Countdown to Halloween Day 17: Anthologies - Ghosts And More Ghosts, Tales From the Crypt, and SCARY!

Welcome back kids! We're on the downward spiral to the 31st! Today's post is all about short story anthologies once again. I bring to the table three books that I have to admit, I had pretty mixed feelings about. Let's take a look shall we? 

When I picked up Robert Arthur's "Ghosts And More Ghosts," at Goodwill a few months back, I immediately knew it was going in the Halloween Read Pile. I mean LOOK AT THIS COVER.

Aw check it! The back cover holds even more grim surprises! These manage to look both Gothic and colorful at the same time, like one of the good Tim Burton films. I'd never heard of it before, but I saw online that many folks had nostalgia for it so I felt pretty excited.

Starting the book, things were interesting at first, with "Footsteps Invisible" a ghost story with a semi-creepy premise. "Mr. Milton's Gift" was just silly. I didn't really like it at all. "The Rose Crystal Bell" was interesting, but felt a bit too similar to "The Monkey's Paw". "The Marvelous Stamps From El Dorado" was another silly one that just didn't interest me. "The Wonderful Day" is not exactly a scary story, but still manages to be one of the best ones in the book, detailing the events in a town that have been supernaturally affected by a little boy's wish after overhearing his parents discussing the townsfolk before bed. It manages to be funny, whimsical, and even downright disturbing in places, considering one woman discovers that her tongue now "wags from both ends".  "Don't Be a Goose" was just silly again and again I found myself wanting to skim forward.

But "Do You Believe in Ghosts?" is pretty much THE best story in this volume. Loved. IT. It tells the story of a reality radio host who stages supernatural events to thrill his listeners... and then the bleief of those listeners makes something happen.

The rest of the stories just kind of happen after that, although "Mr. Dexter's Dragon" had kind of a nice, morbid twist to it. Overall though, I could have done without MOST of this book. I was sorely disappointed upon finishing it.

Another shockingly disappointing read was this adaptation of EC's classic comic series, "Tales From the Crypt" What's odd is that this book doesn't pull its punches really. The stories stay pretty morbid, and the illustrations included demonstrate this nicely.

What's unfortunate is that whomever adapted the stories from comic panel to text seemed to suck ALL of the excitement out of the stories. It's pretty much a passionless, rote description of what happens in the comics. 

The most exciting part of the book are the illustrations, pulled from the comics, that can be found scattered throughout.

Even just the little bit of flavor-text from the captions in the panels seem to be more exciting than the stories themselves.

It's really too bad because I can think of worse things to do than find a way to introduce young horror hounds to the classic horror comics put out by companies like EC back in the day. Heck, why not collect some of the more tame stories and reprint them black and white trades to introduce new readers the right way? Oh well. Moving on.

Finally we have another wildly off-balanced collection of stories that propose to be "Scary! Stories That Will Make You Scream!" Unlike "Ghosts and More Ghosts" above, I can't really let any of the stories pass muster if they don't at least TRY to be scary... Which at least two of them decidedly DO NOT. Just to cover those real quick, we have "The Thirteenth Day of Christmas" which is really more of a kid-sleuth mystery story involving a terrorist around Christmas time, with absolutely no tension to it whatsoever... and "Spotty Powder" which is really just an excerpt from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" that was removed before publishing and doesn't even pretend to be scary. It just makes you scratch your head.

The quality of the stories surrounding those two vary wildly in quality. Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life," is a terrifying classic and was the inspiration for both an episode of the Twilight Zone and a segment of the 80's film of the same name (the reality warping kid story is SOOO much worse in print than on the screen...) "The Restless Ghost" by Leon Garfield is endearing, spooky, and tragic in equal measures. Ramsey Campbell's "The Trick" is incredibly disturbing, and gets extra points for being a story set on Halloween. "Here There Be Tygers" by Stephen King, and "The Man Upstairs" by Ray Bradbury can do no wrong. They are classic! But the rest of the stories here range everywhere from passable to just kind of confusing to no good at all. Another weird thing about this book was it didn't seem like it could decide if it was for kids, young adults, or adults. The stories vary in maturity wildly. All in all, I can't strongly recommend any of these three books on their own merit, and the Tales from the Crypt book should just be avoided unless you're just a completist fan of the comics/show. There are a few gems to be discovered here though, and a few of them were recognized as such and included in other anthologies I had in the read pile further along.

Well... that's all I've got for tonight folks. I'll be back soon with more Ghostly Goodwill Goodies! 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.

Countdown to Halloween Day 11: Anthologies - Ghosts, Monsters, and... Weenies?

Hey there kids! Today let's flip through the pages of a few short story anthologies I've picked up specifically for this year's Halloween Read Pile. 

Here we have a group shot of the four books I'll be highlighting, two books each from two different series of books. Bruce Coville's "Book of..." series, and David Lubar's "Weenies" series. Let's dig right in and get talking spooky stories shall we?

In the "Land of the Lawn Weenies" does not look at first glance like it would be a good Halloween read. I think I often passed over the Weenies books over the years because I assumed they were comedy anthologies. But in fact, the complete opposite is true. Lubar's shorter-than-short tales in the two books I'm featuring here are quite effective. They remind me quite a lot of the stories found in "Half Minute Horrors" which I picked up and read last year.

I felt like "Land of the Lawn Weenies," Lubar's first foray into Weenies territory, is a bit stronger than the other Weenies book I picked up, which I'll talk about below. The stories are unexpectedly bizarre, often deliciously mean-spirited, and some of them border on being genuinely disturbing.

Stories like "The Slide" and "Smunkies" stand out for the feeling that dread that Lubar builds up over the course of a very short period of time, and "Join the Party" manages to be just a little spooky while also being kind of an uplifting, bittersweet story. I felt like "The Evil Tree" and "The Language of Beasts" were a little weak, but almost all of the stories were enjoyable and over in the blink of the eye before I was shuttled along to the next.

There are currently seven books in the Weenies series, and "The Battle of the Red Hot Pepper Weenies" is the one smack-dab in the middle and number four. And unfortunately, it feels a little bit like Lubar is writing a bit too much to cater to the format instead of simply writing stories that genuinely creep you out. There's six years between the two books I have here, and it feels like Lubar is kind of phoning this one in. There are still some great sotires to be found, but this one felt a bit more padded with filler than the previous one. He put out the most recent collection, number seven, in 2014, so I'd be curious to see how that one reads at this point.

There is some shivery fun to be found in "The Department Store," "Braces," and a few others I can't even really recall at the moment, but waaay more of these just fall under the jokey or bizarre category, and the story "Dear Author" just feels like a nasty jab at readers who send him story ideas, or who at least claim to have done so. I might still check out some of the other Weenies books based on my great enjoyment of the first book... but I don't expect much from the later volumes.

Bruce Coville is sort of the unsung, poor-man's R.L. Stine. I actually know him best from his "Into the Land of the Unicorns" series, which my daughter adored growing up... but he's also the guy who wrote all of those "My Teacher is an Alien!" books, and a bunch of Magic Shop books involving haunted or enchanted items bought from a magic shop (one of those, "the Monster's Ring" is a great Halloween read, although very similar to Stine's "The Haunted Mask") This "Book of..." anthology series is not solely written by him, which is a series that includes Books of: Aliens, Nightmares, Magic, Ghosts, Monsters, and Spine Tinglers. With many of those topics actually receiving second volumes as well, making for a total of somewhere around 10-12 books total.

This time around, I'm talking about the weaker book first. This "Book of Monsters" was a semi-fun read but ultimately I felt a little cheated by the end. Many of the stories are just kind of weak, or jokey, or feel like advertisements for other book series. And as much as I like creepy folktales, I like my folktales to actually be creepy, not just kind of a bland retelling. Even Jane Yolen's and Joe Lansdale's stories, (which were each a paltry almost-three pages long) while fun to read, and would have made nice pallet-cleansing stories in a different collection, are pretty much just monster jokes. On the other hand...

Bruce Coville's "Book of Ghosts" had a much better pay-off. There weren't many duds in this collection at all. Almost all of the stories had some sort of spook-factor to them. Even Coville's story, which included characters from some other book or story series, felt standalone and had some good moments of creep and bittersweetness to it.

There's some great talent collected together here as well. We see both Joe Lansdale and Jane Yolen again, who are both personal favorites, and the ghost story maven, Mary Downing Hahn contributes a tale as well. "The Ghost in the Summer Kitchen" was a very nice tale, if slightly predictable, and "For Love of Him" by Vivian Vande Velde actually turned up later in a different anthology in my Halloween Read Pile, and I read through the story both times I liked it so much. I recommend this one very highly!

Overall, I recommend Coville's "Book of Ghosts" and Lubar's "Land of the Lawn Weenies" especially if, like me, you like to gather together creepy collections of short stories for your Halloween reading.

That's it for tonight kids! I'll be back sooner than you're probably entirely comfortable with to share more Gobliny Goodwill Goodies!

And 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.