Edwardian Jackal: ...favored children's books on Halloween...05oct14...

The term 'vintage' for books falls woefully short, since good stories never go out of vogue. Most of the time, they live up to their promise and are carried forward along with us.

As Halloween nears, there are few things as a child that we carry forward with the same emotional response than with horror. Surely, we delight in it, we find exhilaration. They give us a thrill like nothing else. A good horror children's book will have a lasting impression upon our eager minds. How many times did we hide a book, to hide from the sheer fear of its stories? Or, did you sneak them under the sheets, along with the all too critical flashlight, reading them in the unguarded shadow of night?

These are the stories I was lucky to fall into as a child, and have warped my senses since.

"In a Dark Dark Room" by Alvin Schwartz

"In a Dark Dark Room" is so evilly bent. The horror I felt as a child (at what I thought was to be a benign book) today gives way to a twisted pleasure. The stories are deceptively short. There is an efficiency of words. Yet, tied with the illustrations, where they outline the real terror, are tremendously effective.

"and Jenny's head..." Jenny's head! It fell off her body, only because Alfred was unwilling to let her be. Oh, Alfred, could you just enjoy her loving attention otherwise?

With the Berenstain Bears' "Trick or Treat", "In the Dark" or "Berenstain Bear's and the Haunted House"there are some genuine scary moments, especially considering the amount of danger the kids were in.

Imagine escaping from one's room in the middle of the night and running through the country side and into the dark of the forest. That's just cray.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbinders of Suspense"

The Alfred Hitchcock series, which I've blogged a few times now, will always delight. In "Spellbinders of Suspense", there are stories by heavyweights of suspense. The illustrations were moody, though not heavily detailed. Stories included:
"The Chinese Puzzle Box" by Agatha Christie
"The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell
"The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier "Man From The South" by Roald Dahl "Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper" by Robert Bloch "The Man Who Knew How" by Dorothy L. Sayers

Then there's Hitchcock's "Haunted Houseful", with stories like:
"The Red-Headed League" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
"The Treasure in the Cave" by Mark Twain
"The Forgotton Island" by Elizabeth Coatsworth
"The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall"

There's the raw artisan nature of "Georgie". It's just terribly cute.

One of my go-to books,
Scholastic's "FunFact Book of Ghosts" or
here.

A few definitive books that carried terrible visions for me for years of my childhood: the Scholastic books being one of the first. I had checked it out of the Euclid Library so many times they actually stopped me from doing it for several months to allow other kid's to get nightmares. I just couldn't put it down.

Then the Usborne Guides - holy criminy these were the worst
offenders! The illustrations were just bloody,
malignant merzky messel. This was my 'little black book' at
the time and one brought to the Boys and Girls Club. There
were the headless, the poltergeists, the phantom warnings.
Damn you, Usborne and your twisted ways!