Greedy For More Than Candy
To prepare for Halloween, every year I read Halloween books. When my kids were little, I stuck to children’s books and we read them over and over in the weeks preceding October 31st. On the first day of October, my kids still ask to get the Halloween books (and decorations) down from the attic and we all sit down and look through old favorites. My very favorite is Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White and illustrated by Megan Lloyd. Although it is not technically a Halloween book, it does feature pumpkins and the carving up of scary faces: a woman who hates pumpkins ends up with a bumper crop in her front yard (the illustrations are really marvelous). What she does to make them disappear is heart-warming and funny, and not a bit scary. I also love Halloween by Jerry Seinfeld, especially the audio version recorded by him: it is belly-clutching, side-splitting funny. I guess I just prefer warm and funny to scary when it comes to children’s Halloween books — it is easier to get them to bed that way (laughing versus gasping in fear).
But when it comes to ghost stories for grown-ups, I want chills. Not the I-cannot-go-to-bed-without-looking-under-every-bed chills but the fear offered by great stories set in times long ago — so long ago there is no chance of that ghost showing up under my bed. My favorite collection ever is The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton, and along with re-reading those stories every year, I also seek out new collections as October 31 grows near. I feel the need to feed my greed for ghost stories, and every year my greed grows. Perhaps it is the total escape element: as the narrator in “The Bus-Conductor” by E.F. Benson, one of the ghost stories I read yesterday in Scary Stories, states “I like being frightened…I want to be made to creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing of emotions and luxurious of emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.”
Scary Stories, edited by Barry Moser and published by Chronicle Books, includes authors and settings ranging across the centuries, and although I do prefer my ghost stories firmly planted in the nineteenth century or earlier, modern ghost stories like “The Man Upstairs” by Ray Bradbury and “Miriam” by Truman Capote more than fit the bill of chilling me through the scary-bone (versus funny bone). And how is it that a story with a title as sweet as “Kittens” took on such sinister overtones just for having been written by Dean Koontz?
My favorites in Scary Stories were chillers set in bygone times, either in an old rooming house (“The Furnished Room” by O. Henry) or the remote English countryside (“The Music on the Hill” by Saki) or on an old-fashioned Continental Tour (“The Squaw” by Bram Stoker): those stories really grabbed me by my scaredy-cat hairs while still keeping me warm and fuzzy in the centuries-distant romance of it all. Of course “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe (included here, along with an extract from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Poe is a heart-stopping triumph of paranoia, and cannot be beat for classic ghost-thrilling.
Happy Halloween! I wish you hours of chilling and thrilling reading, interrupted only by trick-or-treaters at the door and the chiming of the door bell: answer it if you dare. Ghosts can cross over centuries after all. And don’t forget to check under the bed.
