My Response to Neil Gaiman's Modest Proposal

The master-of-the-macabre suggests that:

... on Hallowe'en or during the week of Hallowe'en, we give each other scary books. Give children scary books they'll like and can handle. Give adults scary books they'll enjoy.

Great idea, I say. And since there are plenty of well-known books for kids-who-love-to-be-scared out there, I figured I'd suggest a few recently published books that may be less familiar. By all means add your own suggestions, old and new, in the comments.

• Jim, Who Ran Away From His Nurse, and Was Eaten By a Lion by Hilaire Belloc is a delightfully deadpan parody of a cautionary tale, amusingly illustrated (with flaps and such) by the clever Mini Gray.


• Calef Brown's Hallowilloween, also a picture book for older kids, is filled with silly poems that are as likely to produce giggles as shivers.


• A Tale Dark and Grimm by Adam Gidwitz, on the other hand, has some truly spine-chilling moments leavened by wit and compassion. An utterly original take on the Grimm fairy tales, I'm reading it aloud right now to my 4th grade class and they are loving it. More from me about it here.


• In The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall Mary Downing Hahn mixes together a Victorian waif, a forbidding manor, an accidental (or was it?) death of a child, and a graveyard with a deliciously spooky story as the result.


• A haunted house is also central to the first of Jacqueline West's Books of Elsewhere series, The Shadows, along with magical objects, talking animals, a variety of ghosts, and an alternate world entered through paintings, making it a compelling read.


• The Boneshaker by Kate Milford is an atmospheric and eerie story featuring a machine-loving girl, Dr. Jake Limberleg's Nostrum Fair and Technological Medicine Show, and the Devil.


• And finally, for teens, there is Adele Griffin and Lisa Brown's Picture the Dead. Set during the Civil War when spiritualism, spirit photography in particular, was in vogue, Jennie Lovell tells her chilling story through text and the pages of her scrapbook.

Also at educating alice.

 

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Comments

[AngelaCerrito]

12:24 PM on 10/25/2010

I wish my favorite THE BOOK OF DARKNESS from B4U Publishing would get published in English soon!

[Pantstrovich]

02:04 AM on 10/25/2010

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell
Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Uzumaki by Junji Ito

Scary Stories is aimed at kids, though I don't actually remember the stories that well. It's the pictures that scare you. The stories are mostly urban legends from what I remember.

I liked Poe when I was a kid, but then, I was a pretty scary kid... Not sure what the age group for Poe should be. Use your Head. Know your kid.

Uzumaki is aimed at adults and scared the crap out of me. I gained a temporary phobia after reading the books (3). I'm too scared to read them again so far, but they were very good. I couldn't put them down.

[Hematite]

12:22 AM on 10/25/2010

My third grade teacher read to us from a collection of folk stories, "Giants, Witches and a Dragon or Two" edited by Phyllis Fenner (1962). I found the book again many years later and it still was terrifying. I particularly remember the Albanian story "The Boy Who Killed the Dif," and told the story to my own kids when they were young (a dif (presumably related to the Turkish 'dev') is a cannibal giant from the underworld who comes out of wells to steal people-- shades of Grendel). There was another story, from Paraguay, I think, about a giant cannibal witch who snatches children to take back to her mountain cave, and can fly with the aid of a stone taken from the head of a dragon. There also are stories of Baba Yaga and Jack the Giant Killer. The stories are more vivid than Grimm and lack the crude brutality that mars their stories.

[CorkeyC]

08:49 PM on 10/24/2010

For kids, not terribly scary, but definitely offbeat: Frankenstein's Cat by Curtis Jobling: http://amzn.to/bhv2eG. For adults, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty: http://amzn.to/cj5ZDT. Read this in high school and just thinking about it gives me the heebie-jeebies.

[EleanorJustice]

01:43 PM on 10/24/2010

For eeks and shivers I'd also suggest Mulengro by Charles DeLint, appropriate for adults and possibly for mentally sturdy teens.

[nmurdock]

10:19 AM on 10/24/2010

I teach 4th grade and my kids love Neal Shusterman. "Darkness Creeping" is their favorite. :)

[Kim Gray]

10:07 AM on 10/24/2010

When I was in the 4th grade, I read "Wait Til Helen Comes" by Mary Downing Hahn and to this day, I remember it scaring the pee out of me

[Billy Bones]

09:51 AM on 10/24/2010

Billy Bones: A Tale from the Secrets Closet and Billy Bones: The Road to Nevermore are my top two picks, of course.

[Janice Rawlins]

11:54 AM on 10/25/2010

humm, I want to read Billy Bones to the kids it sounds like a good book. The book called Blood Darters and it is young adult about an haunted house with some strange little critters and it is a twist and turn book...not to long to read but it is different..

I will make sure Billy Bones is on the kids list! Thanks