![]() ![]() Or how about the art for “Wonderful Sausage”, with a dismembered hand holding a forkful of human flesh? Or the iconic portrait of the dead corpse from “The Haunted House” facing straight off the page, peering into your soul. His depictions of ghosts, particularly for stories like “Somebody Fell from Aloft”, were terrifying on the page, the kind of imagery that sticks with you when you close your eyes at night. He excelled at drawing scraggly corpses with spaghetti-thin hair and deep, dark eye sockets. Gammell’s artwork helped set the tone alongside Schwartz’s words. Those early experiences struck deep and as I grew older, I grew hungrier for horror.Ī conversation about Scary Stories is never complete without giving the highest of kudos to illustrator Stephen Gammell. I remember times when the stories did chill my bones… before soccer practice, during quiet hours at the library, and best of all, right before bedtime. Stine, Ghostbusters, and Ernest Scared Stupid. Though I wasn’t yet ready for the Freddy Kruegers and Jason Voorhees of the world, Scary Stories did set me on that path, serving as my bridge to R.L. “Since there isn’t any danger, we think it is fun.” Something clicked in my brain. “Telling scary stories is something people have done for thousands of years, for most of us like being scared in that way,” he wrote in the first book’s introduction. He taught me why it’s fun to be scared and why we, as fiction consumers, are drawn to the macabre. Schwartz’s stories were my own primitive horror diet. There was also a butcher who mixed human meat into his sausage and a ghost with bloody fingers terrorizing a hotel! I read these books over and over with friends, at the dinner table, in class. I devoured tales about a girl who scared herself to death, a psychopath who preyed on a babysitter, and a girl who had spider eggs hatching on her face. While the stories were simplified to suit grammar school kids, the brutality of the stories was never diluted. Each book was an unsettling collection of children’s tales culled from old folklore and renowned urban legends. Originally published in 1981, the book spawned two additional volumes: 1984’s More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and 1991’s Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. ![]() But even before my mallrat days, I was hyped at the school book fair when I got my grubby little paws on the ultimate game changer, my gatekeeper to this world I still love: author Alvin Schwartz and artist Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. ![]() When I was a kid, my mom nurtured my love of reading, often letting me gallivant around Waldenbooks in search of the latest Fear Street or Goosebumps release. Horror is a deep-seated fandom often tracing back to childhood, a collection of formative years where our young minds are sponges, thirsting for our next greatest influence or obsession. ![]()
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