Countdown to Halloween: Kids' Books

Halloween has arrived! Since this awesome holiday is (ostensibly) about kids, I wanted to share some great books I, and plenty of other folks, loved to read and reread as a child. These are the books that made me the Halloween and horror fan I remain to this day!

Norman Bridwell, most famous for creating Clifford the Big Red Dog, had several books of charmingly-drawn monsters. I mean, they are adorable. Look at Dracula waving, for Chrissakes!

Another fantastically well-illustrated monster book was this makeup how-to by Alan Ormsby, who had starred as the most obnoxious theater troupe leader ever in Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things (1973).

Bunnicula! A classic tale of a vampire rabbit. Lots of sequels apparently.

Books like these were a treasure trove of horror movie history. In the days before VCRs, much less DVDs and the internet, the only way a kid could see a lot of these movies was to read these books and imagine them in his head...The distinctive orange-spined Crestwood Series has sent many a 30-something dude scouring the net for hours trying to figure out what the heck they were called.

As noted previously, I don't draw like I did when I was kid, but I fondly recall these two how-to books were staples for the after-school and Saturday hours.

Well, I've come to the end of my Countdown to Halloween. Hope you readers enjoyed it, and have a happy horror-day... even if this crazy lady doesn't want you to!

Countdown to Halloween: Horror Around the House

As we get right up on Halloween, here's a nice chunk of the horror-related books and toys and whatnot I like to accessorize with at home.

Three old-school Draculas guard the bookshelf...

Horror fiction in various states of read- and unread-ness. You got your King hardcovers that date from when I was in high school, and countless books good and bad I've collected (I do not recommend re-reading It as an adult, however Song of Kali remains perhaps the greatest horror novel I've ever read). I am particularly fond of '70s and '80s paperbacks, mass market/drugstore rack stuff long before it was reprinted at $14 a pop for a movie tie-in. Looking for a nice I Am Legend paperback, cheap, as well as the splatterpunk stuff I used to read nearly 20 years ago that I've since sold off. Wow, very little Straub and what, no Machen or Blackwood! Gotta get on that. Anybody remember the Dell Abyss line? This guy does.



Some of my beloved Sideshow monster toys!

A stack of horror movie books. You cannot go wrong with The Overlook Horror Encyclopedia, The Book of the Dead, Nightmare Movies, or Immoral Tales! Get your Netflix queue ready.

And Clive Barker's demonic ladies guard over his works below.



I love these 11 x 14" posters; they're great if you don't have a lot of wall space. The one for Zombi 2 came with the 2-disc DVD set!


And Brundlefly and Cesare from Dr. Caligari's cabinet round things up!

Countdown to Halloween: Portraits of Dracula

I don't draw nearly as much as when I was a kid. Every now and then I'll take out an old notebook to sketch and occasionally, lo and behold, it ain't that bad.



This post is part of the Countdown to Halloween.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

(photograph by Robert Caplin for The New York Times)

Peering into the open jaws of an enormous man-eating shark and contemplating the eternal struggle to survive, to consume; indeed, the insatiate maw that awaits us all? Now that's what I call "modern art." That whole thing about "questioning the relationship between viewer and art"? It can go fuck itself.