Ah, dear reader. Welcome back into the chilling, thrilling Ghostly Grotto. Sit down, won't you? Ah, that's better... First of all, I would like to apologize for my lack of posting lately. This post has been awhile in the works, and I've had a lot on my plate lately. So, I'll be posting more regularly now. Sorry! Recently, I've been adding to my large collection of horror literature (see photo at left), and some of the little gems I've ordered online or found in used bookstores are very quaint little collections of ghost stories from the 1970s. As you can see, I've also finally acquired a set of first editions of the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark series, which I might touch on later in another blog post. But these strange books, the ones on the bottom of the image, are the focus of today's post. They're ghost story collections published from the 1950s to the 1970s, and they're published by Scholastic (though two of them claim to be published by Arrow). Some of the stories inside are strangely spooky and interesting, and some of them are not. But, they're vintage horror related, so I bought them and I mostly enjoy reading them. But, in preparation to make this blog post, I stumbled upon a treasure trove of other Scholastic Halloween books that were published around the same time (1970's), and so I decided to briefly touch on two of them here today. THE ARROW BOOK OF GHOST STORIES, published in 1958, is the oldest of the Scholastic horror books. It features several entertaining stories that fail to deliver a real shock rather than just a chuckle or a giggle. The best story in here is not in because it is scary, just entertaining. "King O' The Cats," (known to some who may have listened to the Troll record Weird Tales Of The Unknown as The Cat That Didn't Purr) is a clever tale of a band of cats who a man meets in the road, then tell him to let his cat know that one of them has died. I won't spoil the ending, but it's very clever. THE HAUNTED HOUSE AND OTHER SPOOKY POEMS AND TALES was published in 1970 by Scholastic, and it may be my favorite of all the books published. It's not extremely spooky, but it has several very good tales in it, along with quite a few poems and legends. Most of the stories are from other authors such as Ogden Nash, Ann McGovern, E. V. Rieu and many others. This book was one of the best of its kind for the time. In fact, the litany at the beginning was borrowed by Alvin Schwartz when he wrote Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark: Parts of the book were released onto a 7 inch vinyl record by Scholastic the same year. Though it's not impossible to find, it's hard to find with its original picture sleeve, as seen below: Here's a link to one of the stories from the record, the title story "The Haunted House". A very spooky story, not scary but eerie and very atmospheric: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHHUEFsYdYE
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorA Halloween fanatic, scary story vinyl collector, and ghost story teller extraordinaire. All self-proclaimed titles, however. Archives
December 2019
Categories
|