Banned Books Week Reading: More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Yesterday, I exchanged Alvin Schwartz’ Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark for More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, since I had already read the former. Another thin book with large type, I finished the book already. I started reading it just before bed and stopped after a story about a man being haunted by a dog. The stories didn’t keep me awake, though many are quite creepy. I find Stephen Gammell’s drawings more frightening than the text. Some of the faces on the corpses and ghosts give me the hoo-ha’s. I can understand why parents could be concerned about their young children reading or hearing these stories. Some of them deal with murder and the murder of animals, not to mention witches, ghosts, and a vampire for good measure.
I found the endnotes quite interesting. Schwartz sources many of the tales and gives a little bit of history about some of the common themes in folklore, like vampires and vanishing hitchhikers.
