Spooky season is here! I just adore this time of year, maybe even more so than Christmas.
The first thing I did to celebrate was pull out Daphne’s Halloween books. We started reading them right away, including The Ghost-Eye Tree by Bill Martin Jr. and John Archambault, with illustrations by Ted Rand.
One dark and windy autumn night when the sun has long gone down, a young boy and his older sister are sent to the end of town to get a bucket of milk. As they walk down the lonely road, bathed in eerie moonlight, all the boy can think about is the ghost-eye tree...What will happen when they come to the tree? Can they run past it or will it reach out and grab them? (Blurb from amazon.com.)
This is one Daphne hasn’t always been partial too, but this year, the rhymes caught her attention, and now we’re reading it regularly.
This one is special to me, too, because I remember it from read-aloud in Mrs. Connelly’s first grade. I found it creepy then and loved the pictures.
Now, I appreciate the folksy rhythm of the verse and the sweetness of the underlying story, what it’s really about–two siblings experiencing a surprising moment of tenderness. Ellie, the narrator’s sister, runs back to the terrifying ghost tree to rescue her little brother’s special hat, blown off his head when the tree scared them on their way home from fetching milk.
The story captures one of those rare moments many of us can relate to, when we realize our awful brother or sister actually does love us and maybe isn’t so awful after all.
The story’s atmosphere and pictures are also meaningful now because they look so much like where we live. Rand’s artwork accurately evokes the deep darkness of the countryside, where the utter lack of electric light makes the black so thick it feels tangible.
I can also appreciate the eyes in the tree, having seen ghostly, creepy eyes myself right in our own backyard. They’re only animals, of course. In our case, we sometimes see the eerie green of does’ eyes when we flash our high-powered flashlight over the fir trees on our way out to lock up the hens. In the book, the eyes in the old oak probably belong to an owl. But, from a child’s perspective–or even a fanciful adult’s–who’s to say for sure?
I also pulled out Scary, Scary Halloween by Eve Bunting, with pictures by Jan Brett.
Four pairs of eyes stare from the blackness to watch fearsome creatures trick-or-treat. (from amazon.com)
We haven’t read this one yet this year, but it’s also one of my favorites. I don’t remember it from school; I only know it as an adult, and I adore the delightful, surprising point of view from which it’s written–that of a mama cat keeping her kittens safe under the porch on Halloween night as all the strange ghoulies and creatures come and go.
It is also written in rhyming verse (all the way through unlike Ghost-Eye), so it also has that atmospheric sing-song quality, and its pictures are just gorgeous–also very much like Vermont, where we live.
When I used to read this book to Daphne back in Texas, I daydreamed about what it would be like to spend Halloween in countryside like this one. Well, now I do, and it is absolutely wonderful, giving our spooky days a deeper, more stirring autumn vibe.
The old English teacher in me can’t help myself when I read these picture books, either. I imagine all the ways these rich texts could be used in a Halloween unit: for inferencing, rhyming, understanding point of view, etc. It almost makes me want to develop a lesson, complete with a creative writing and art component. Like, how might you rewrite The Ghost-Eye Tree from the point of view of the owl up in that old oak? How would you illustrate it?
I also downloaded a couple old favorites for myself: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Books 1 & 2 by folklorist Alvin Schwartz, complete with the original horrifying artwork by Stephen Gammell. I ate these up as a kid, as did several of my elementary classmates; I think we all bought our copies at the Scholastic Book Fair (way before they were banned), and of course the pictures were what first caught everyone’s eye. I still find them delightfully nightmarish.
Schwartz’s collection was also my introduction to a lot of American folklore–creatures like the wendigo, and urban legends like “The Babysitter” and “High Beams”–ugh, that one really got under my skin.
It wasn’t pure nostalgia that led me to purchase these digital copies. I have an idea for a little scary story of my own, a new spin on “The Bride,” a tale about a young woman who goes missing on her wedding day. She turns up dead years later in a trunk in her father’s attic, presumably after climbing in while playing hide and seek and getting trapped inside. It’s a variation on the old buried alive theme.
I’m considering setting my version in an old Vermont farmhouse that has a witch’s window; that window would play a significant role, of course. And, maybe, what happened to the bride wasn’t actually an accident…
I came up with the idea after coming across a call online for a themed issue of a horror magazine, and I wanted to revisit the original version before doing any drafting. I realized Schwartz’s book would be good source material.
We’ll see if I get a chance to write it. I might not be able to do anything with it, given time constraints and how it might actually turn out (I’ve been hard at work on something else, a short story epilogue to “Elspeth and the Fairy”), but getting this creepy story down would be good practice regardless. Who knows? Maybe I’ll just share it here for Halloween.
Tonight, while I enjoy an adult beverage, I plan to decorate the house.
What are your favorite titles for spooky season? I always love recs!
See you next week!
XOXO,
Jenn
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Jennifer Shaw 