Home » Posts tagged "folklore" (Page 3)

Book Review: The Scary Stories Treasury: Three Books to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz, illustrated by Stephen Gammell

In honor of Banned Books Week, a review of Alvin Schwartz’s The Scary Stories Treasury, which had a place on the American Library Association’s Top 10 Banned and Challenged Books list from 2000-2009. This review was written about the hardcover edition of the original compilation, with illustrations by Stephen Gammell: it doesn’t appear to be available in hardcover at this time.

 

Scary Stories Treasury; Three Books to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz, illustrated by Stephen Gammell

HarperCollins Publishers, 2013

ISBN-13: 978-0060263416

Available: New and Used paperback

 

The Scary Stories Treasury contains three popular volumes of “scary stories”, collected from folklore and urban legends by Alvin Schwartz: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. Any librarian who isn’t familiar with the books collected in this volume really needs to check them out. Not only are these titles in high demand for older children and teens, but they are an incredible storytelling resource. In fact, in the introduction to Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Schwartz writes that scary stories are “meant to be told”.

 

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark is the best known of the three books, and is the one I’ve used the most. It both starts and ends with “jump” stories, and these are fun to tell to a group. “The Viper” and “The Ghost with Bloody Fingers” are stories I’ve frequently told. Also included are the poem “A Man Who Lived in Leeds”, the song “Old Woman All Skin and Bone”, “The Hearse Song” and the Halloween game “The Dead Man’s Brains”. Other stories in the book include variants on familiar tales, such as “The Guests”, in which a young couple looking for a place to stay the night learn after the fact that their hosts were ghosts, and urban legends like “The Hook”, in which news that a murderer with a hook for a hand is on the loose spoils a date. Finally, there are some truly creepy and scary tales about ghosts, witches, shapeshifters, and the supernatural. While most of these come from folklore, and can’t be mistaken for anything happening today, they can still give readers, and listeners, the shivers.

 

More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark has longer stories. Some are set in a specific historical period, such as “The Weird Blue Light”, which takes place during the Civil War. Many of them have sudden endings. In “Something Was Wrong”, we follow a bewildered and frightened John Sullivan around, learning only in the last few words that he is dead. Some folktales have clearly been adapted for a modern audience, such as “The Drum” an ominous contemporary variant of the folktale “The New Mother”. Schwartz doesn’t hold back or moralize when he retells a story. “Wonderful Sausage” is a clever and horrifying tale about a butcher who adds a special ingredient to his sausage. This volume also has a few more contemporary tales, ranging from frightening to tragic, and a description of the creepy sleepover game “A Ghost in the Mirror”. While the stories in this volume are more satisfying in many ways, I’d say these tales are aimed at a slightly older audience.

 

Scary Stories 3 continues with more detailed and sometimes complicated stories. In “Just Delicious”, a twist on the folktale “The Golden Arm”, a terrified wife feeds her husband a dead woman’s liver without his knowledge… and the woman wants it back. “Harold” is a chilling story of a vengeful doll. “The Wolf Girl”, set in a specific time and place, has its basis in the lives of real people, as does “The Trouble”, a story about poltergeist activity in the Lombardo household. “Maybe You Will Remember”, a baffling story about a girl whose sick mother disappears from her hotel, becomes truly horrifying when the reader turns to the notes at the back of the book to solve the puzzle. The volume wraps up with a couple of mildly funny stories. Of the three books, I’d say this is my least favorite, possibly because it is so grounded in detail, as details often distract listeners, making it harder to get them engaged in the story.

 

All three books have detailed notes and bibliographies provided by the author. While you don’t have to read the notes to enjoy the stories (with the exception of “Maybe You Will Remember”) they are easy to understand and interesting. All three books also have incredible illustrations by gifted children’s book illustrator Stephen Gammell, done in just black and white ink. It’s his illustrations that make the books so magnetic to kids… and so terrifying. The illustration for “Wonderful Sausage”, as an example,  brings a whole new grotesque dimension to the story. With just a few strokes and some shading, Gammell ups the scare level considerably. Tormented, skeletal faces, ragged clothes, distorted and indistinct figures, glowing eyes and teeth, empty chairs, empty baskets, empty clothes… it’s enough to cause nightmares, and makes much more impact than if we had only Schwartz’s words. Many collections of scary stories from American folklore don’t include illustrations, or at least not effective ones, and that is probably one of the reasons why more of them aren’t well known. The Scary Stories books, however, are notorious, to the point that the series was seventh on the American Library Association’s list of the most frequently challenged books for 2000-2009, and the illustrations are surely a good part of the reason why these books in particular are noticed.

 

The main benefit of owning The Scary Stories Treasury is that you’ll have all three books in one volume. Each book appears to have been faithfully reproduced, with Gammell’s original illustrations. However, there’s no new or additional material here. Readers who don’t have the books and want them might want to consider this volume, but for those who already own them, there’s no reason to purchase it. I highly recommend that libraries of all kinds have at least one copy of each of the books included in The Scary Stories Treasury, and the Treasury itself might make a nice reference volume, and you’ll find that the Scary Stories books are rarely on the shelves. The Scary Stories Treasury is highly recommended to libraries and readers who do not already own copies of the Scary Stories books, and recommended as a reference volume for school and public libraries. Appropriate, based on maturity of the reader, for grades 4 and up.

 

Contains: Violence, gore, cannibalism, deception, the occult, witchcraft, murder.

Review by Kirsten Kowalewski

Posted on September 27, 2019 by , 1 comment

Long Fiction Review: Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung by Usman Malik (Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74)

“Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” by Usman Malik

Nightmare Magazine, Issue 74, November 2018

ASIN: B07K386T2B

Available: Kindle edition

 

“Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” is an #ownvoices novelette that takes place in Pakistan. The narrator is a cleaned-up heroin addict who has been accused of killing a doctor in Uch, a site of pilgrimage, at various times, for Sufis, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. The tale is his confession to the police, who he is certain will turn him over to some very angry heroin dealers who think he swindled them.

The narrator tells the story of being rescued and sobered up by a doctor studying snake venoms for their healing uses,  who has been asking addicts in the park if they have seen a girl in a photo he carries. The girl turns out to be his wife, Maliha, purchased by him when she was eight years old, who became a herpetologist. Maliha ran away to seek the Serpent Pearl, a mythological stone given by the Serpent King of the underworld to his wife, which gave her the power to command animals and birds, immunity to venom, open a gateway to other worlds, and immortality, that she believed could be found in Uch. The doctor decides to follow her to Uch, accompanied by the narrator, who is now on the run from heroin dealers.

In Uch, they approach a shrine during a musical festival. The narrator follows the doctor past the crowd and into the shrine, and witnesses the doctor’s apparent, and fatal, reunion with his wife, who may be a cobra, or an apparition, or may be something else entirely, driving him to poison the water supply of Uch with snake venom as he loses touch with reality.

The setting and much of the language are way outside of my realm of experience, and I don’t feel that I can truly do this story justice, but I can say that the summary above in no way can express the feeling of this tale. It is a fever dream that creates a world that envelops the reader in a combination of the grim life of a heroin addict, with a dark mythology grounded in both Pakistani folklore and cosmic horror.  At the same time, it is grounded in a terrible real-life story: the doctor who purchases a wife when she is eight, and chases her down when she runs away as a young woman. In “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” Usman Malik steps the reader into an unreal, fantastic, and horrifying world that he makes very, very real.

 

Reviewed by Kirsten Kowalewski

 

Editor’s note: “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung” is a nominee on the final ballot of the 2018 Bram Stoker Awards in the category of Superior Achievement in Long Fiction. 

Posted on May 14, 2019 by , Reply

Monster Kid Request: The Hunt for “Fearsome Critters”

         

 

Well, his birthday is not until September but the Monster Kid came to me last night and told me what he wanted for his birthday.

Specifically, he requested a book called Fearsome Critters. 

“You remember, Mom, Dad had a copy for Monster Librarian. It had the Hodag in it.” (The Hodag?)

We looked it up on Amazon. There are some interesting books that come up on Amazon when you search the term “fearsome critters” but the only book of that name appeared to have been written many, many years ago. So, not one that we would have had sent to us for review.  I knew the book he was talking about, so I could identify the front cover.  It is not a book that appears on Amazon, or comes up at usedbooksearch.net, although the first book we found, Fearsome Critters by Henry H. Tryon, kept popping up, as well as one by Alvin Schwartz that looked pretty neat, called Kickle Snifters and Other Fearsome Critters. This, I am sure, is a children’s book, based in folklore, because that’s what Alvin Schwartz wrote (he was also the compiler for the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books).  A book that did pop up during our Amazon search, and a much more recent choice, would be Monica Farrier’s Mysterious Beasties of the Northwoods: Creatures from North American Folklore. It’s described as an illustrated field guide, but I can’t tell whether it would be a good choice for children (illustrated=interesting to look at, as far as the Monster Kid is concerned, but I have no idea if it’s age appropriate in content) I’m not sure why she substituted “mysterious beasties” for “fearsome critters”, since “fearsome critters” is clearly the term that is most widely used.

“I need the second book, Mom, The Return of The Fearsome Critters.”  Okay, more information is always good. Still nothing on Amazon, although it does look like I could get my very own baby doll “fearsome critters” T-shirt if I want to.  So back to usedbooksearch.net I go. And yes! There is a book with that title by an author named Warren S. James, at both AbeBooks.com and Biblio.com, for sale from a tiny independent bookseller in Canada, Laird Books. There’s a picture of the cover, and the cover is the one I remember. This is the book! Laird Books identifies it as a children’s book, so now I just have to figure out where in the house it has wandered off to, or snag a copy from this bookstore in Canada. Problem solved.

But what is more interesting to me than the book the Monster Kid was really asking about is that there is actually an original book titled Fearsome Critters, and it was written in 1939 by a man named Henry H. Tryon, to document the tales told by lumberjacks about the creatures that inhabited the northwoods. So “fearsome critters” aren’t just the fictional invention of one man, they’re part of an entire tradition of scary stories about creatures that might have been lurking just outside the reach of the light of the campfires. Creatures that, yes, even scared burly lumberjacks. And I discovered that you can read an illustrated copy online, at lumberwoods.com, which has all kinds of interesting information about fearsome critters, including online copies of two additional books written on the same subject:  Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods by William T. Cox, (published in 1910), and  The Hodag, And Other Tales Of The Logging Camps by Luke Kearny (published in 1928) written on the same subject. Not only that, but a composer named Laurence Bitensky has actually written a musical score for wind ensemble, with a narrator, based partially on the descriptions found in Tryon’s book! You can listen to it here.

So there. Campfire stories to give you the creeps don’t have to come from urban legend. There is a tradition of frightening American folklore built right in to not just the present, but the past. Then, as now, there was plenty to be afraid of in the dark. Remember that the next time you pitch a tent in the woods as the sun is going down.

Or, instead, you could turn the pages of one of these guides in the comfort of your home, with your monster-loving kid sitting, mesmerized by the habits of the Hodag, right beside you.

 

 

 

Posted on July 5, 2014 by , 2 comments
First « 123