Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Bring on the ghosts, the ghouls and the unhappy endings.
Oct 27, 1999 | There's no holiday like Halloween, with its domesticated thrill of fear, its transfiguring disguises, its license for mischief and -- not least -- all that candy. What creature, natural or supernatural, could be unnatural enough not to love Halloween? Well, maybe the tooth fairy.
Dental advocates like Herself who become tempted to slip a book into the trick-or-treat bag instead of candy will find plenty of goodies to choose from. Anthologies of ghost stories, chapter books about witches, and gothics for tots crowd the shelves this time of year. They'll keep the Halloween spirit alive well past Thanksgiving, when long-hoarded sugar pumpkins have turned to rock.
Angela Barrett -- whose heroic "Joan of Arc" and "Snow White" have become classics -- provides delicate illustrations for "The Random House Book of Ghost Stories," which features tales that are, on the whole, more melancholy or comic than frightening. Originally published in Great Britain, it brings together such British masters as Leon Garfield, Penelope Lively and Philippa Pearce.
In Pearce's "The Yellow Ball," a pair of children call up a phantom dog who appears each evening at dusk to chase her favorite toy; eventually they come to understand their unmeaning cruelty in keeping her tied to this world.
In Lively's "Uninvited Ghosts," a family of specters as irritating as in-laws haunt the children of the house. They sing hymns, suck juicily on peppermints and recite arithmetic tables in the children's ears so they can't concentrate on their homework; it takes all the young heroes' ingenuity to get rid of them.
And Garfield's story, "Laughter in the Dark," is a Dickensian vignette about a miser. Like the master, Garfield creates an atmosphere of seething gloom that nevertheless can't quite squelch the world's essential benevolence.
A few of the book's selections -- Joan Aiken's "Little Nym," John Gordon's "Grandmother's Footsteps" and Susan Hill's "A Friend Forever" -- are variations on the theme of the lonely ghost who tries to carry away a living soul for company. These few stories are truly chilling.
"A Newbery Halloween" takes on ghosts and goblins from our side of the pond. Some pieces, such as Beverly Cleary's "The Baddest Witch in the World" and E. L. Konigsburg's "A Halloween to Remember," are excerpted from books probably already sitting on the shelves of the well-read child. Still, it's nice to be reminded of why "Ramona the Pest" and "Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth," from which these excerpts are taken, deserve to be read over and over.
Other selections are less familiar, more self-contained. In my favorite, Konigsburg's "Camp Fat," a ghostly counselor visits the bedsides of a pair of troubled campers. She shows them pieces of damaged jewelry with treasures hidden inside -- a metaphor for the selves they keep hidden.
If "The Random House Book of Ghost Stories" and "A Newbery Halloween" are assortments of Godiva truffles, Robert D. San Souci's "Short and Shivery" series is the literary equivalent of candy corn. San Souci collects and retells supernatural stories -- folk tales, urban legends, even the occasional story from Hawthorne or Hans Christian Andersen -- in a plain, straightforward voice. No literary flourishes here; if there ever were any, San Souci has stripped them out. Brief, easy to follow, with a spooky twist rather than a subtle moral, these tales are perfectly calculated to tempt young adrenaline junkies. Even the ugly black-and-white illustrations seem deliberately unpretentious, as if to reassure readers that this isn't stuff the grown-ups will push you to read.
Little Wendy, the heroine of Alice Low's "The Witch Who Was Afraid of Witches," would probably appreciate those tales. Wendy lives with her two bossy older sisters, Polly (isn't that a witchy name!) and Wog. "You don't know anything, and you'll never learn," they tell her. "Your voice is too weak. You don't even know how to cackle." Poor, cowed Wendy believes them. But, appropriately enough in a chapter book for early readers beginning to discover their abilities, Wendy finds her powers burgeoning once her sisters have flown off to their Halloween revels. An unsaccharine Cinderella story, "The Witch Who Was Afraid of Witches" delivers sweet revenge. Illustrations by Jane Manning show Wendy as a spunky, green-skinned witch with a magnificent nose and a chin wart any kid would be proud of.
Get Salon in your mailbox!