My apologies for taking so long to get back to this list. I have been reading (and doing) a few other things. I also have a few books FROM the list that I have read and need to review.
Today I’ll tackle Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories (series).
I read SCARY STORIES To Tell In the Dark. The first thing you should know about this book is that it isn’t very scary. The best stories in this anthology barely make sense. It seems too much to ask for them to actually frighten the reader.
Having read it through in about an hour (in the dark, as prescribed in the subtitle) I found myself thinking “Huh?” at the end of most of these short, weirdly written stories. Granted I’m not a pre-teen boy, and I wasn’t sitting around a campfire while reading the book. But I WAS ready to be just a little bit creeped out. And nothing on these pages came to even that low standard of fear.
You’d have to dig deep to find anything particularly offensive about these vanilla, bland, lame, tales but using out “banned” matrix… I’ll go with:
- Occult Satanism for the ghost story element and
- Violence?
Mostly I’d just warn you to stay away because these stories are outdated, boring, and not well written.
(Hint: if you are relying on the stage direction of “jump out at your friends” for the climax of a scary story… it isn’t a scary enough story.)
WAIT! I just thought of something nice to say about the book… The illustrations were pretty creepy. So “Huzzah to the illustrator!”
ritaLOVEStoWRITE 
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