Rebecca Reads

I admit: The Dangerous Alphabet by Neil Gaiman is the first Neil Gaiman book I’ve read. And it is a clever one. While it’s clearly a children’s book, it has an element of spookiness to it and somber, spidery illustrations that make it just right for adults too.

After reading Edgar Allan Poe last week, I thought I’d stay in the same era and read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories. To my delight, many of Hawthorne’s stories perfectly fit the “gothic” theme of Halloween in a style that I loved. Even though I dislike of being “scared,” these stories were again the perfect amount of [...]

In my mind, Edgar Allan Poe is the most well-known Halloween-ish short story writer. To keep with the season, I reread some of Poe’s short stories. I enjoyed his stories when I was younger - I even rewrote “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a play for my high school’s Halloween “one-act plays.” [...]

Washington Irving’s ghost stories are just my type of ghost story: they’re tricky and creepy, but full of twists. Irving’s twists are rather predictable, but I found that Irving’s long-winded, wordy, early-1800s prose made his stories delightful to read.