...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!

The Haunted Mansion 45, just fun!

The truly blood-curdling illustrations
of the Usborne Guides, this blogger
has more.

Five Little Pumpkins by Dan Yaccarino - it's the funnest song for
Halloween and pumpkins by far.

For full site, please visit edwardianjackal.com.

...Five Pop Horror Short Story Anthologies I Tripped Over as a Child...

Where I survey collections of short stories and drift from the overly popular...

I dug deep into the way back machine for horror books that I read as a child.  I read everything.  Horror really had no particular appeal to me, as it was, and still is, not my schtick.  What did intrigue me with horror, and why I returned time and again, was the thrill of the craft.  Horror, as a genre, has to find that fine line between reality and insanity.  Too often do authors slip into the latter, borrowing little from the former, and you end up with a mess that cannot pretend to keep you interested.  But when it's good - it's thrilling.

The first foray that I remember was drifting from paranormal books, which is a natural interest, then lapsing into horror via mystery.  The first mystery stories I read in grade school were the ones that centered around a picture, then you had to figure out who the culprit was based on the combination of the graphic and the prompt.  It was a back door into a reading comprehension quiz.  But, not being a gifted problem solver, really, I appreciated the lengths of logic that threaded out to arrive at the resolution.

Before I could buy my own books, I had to find them at garage sales with my mother, or, if I was with my dad for a weekend, it would be at the used book shops near Huntington Beach.  There I discovered Alfred Hitchcock, before I had ever seen a movie or TV show, with his anthology series.  The most memorable was "Haunted Houseful".  There was also "Ghostly Gallery".  continued below...

Even in death you would have to imagine Alfred trying to
scare people as much as possible.

Short stories was a normal route for
early King.

Years later, while in the Army, I turned to Stephen King books, more than likely because the small library we had in the Menden (Germany) barracks, which was nothing more than a large room in the attic of the building, had very few popular fiction choices but King.  Luckily, I read Misery first, then moved on to his master work, The Shining.  Both were tremendous reads, but, I think many of us would easily consider Shining such an artful balance of character, pacing and story.  I read it twice while on a 'field problem' - where we had to spend at least a week or two in the field simulating a war exercise.  One night was particularly eerie while trying to get through it, as a wind storm blew through an old farmhouse we were sleeping in.  The attic was well over two hundred years old and full of dust.  Its dark corners wouldn't lighten up even in the day.

From there, and the purpose of this post was short story, so Different Seasons.  King's short stories are a hoot and, in his style, very quick and enjoyable.

Post-Army, when I could start buying my own books, I got into Clive Barker's shorts including In the Flesh.  Barker is much more of a sadist than King, infusing his stories to cringe-inducing effects.  However, it's when he lapses into the more subtle forms of horror do we feel that he understands this world very well.

In The Further Adventures of the Joker, which was a cross-over for me, as comics were a hot commodity from '88 through '95, of moving from graphic renditions of the Batman and Joker and to the written rendition.  Of note was a particular story where, as the Joker was a child, he would lure kids into the forest and leave them dying in a water tower.  Creepy stuff.

Lastly, and fairly recent, was an anthology of stories as part of The Twilight Zone.  These original stories were in the spirit of what Serling did best: stories that are in the transcendent, rarefied air.  Since I couldn't get enough Zone on television and probably watched each episode at least five times each, this anthology gave me 18 new stories to cull over.  Interesting take away wasn't so much the stories, but the forward.  It gives a brief story about Serling's Korean War experience that probably set the tone for his take on storytelling.  Fascinating stuff.  What will you read yourself this Halloween?