Archive for children’s horror

Book of the Week: Goosebumps 25th Anniversary Collection by R. L. Stine

Posted in Books, Media with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 29, 2018 by ranranami

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Goosebumps is close to my heart. Funny how you can read a book that you love so much, even reading another copy with a different cover just doesn’t seem like an option. Don’t get me wrong, the redesigns are cute, and it sort of revives the series in a way for a younger generation. Yet I love the old art here. It’s very 90s, and very much a slice of my childhood.

I’ve always love reading, but when I was 6, learning to actively put a sentence together was hard. I’ll save you the whole story of how it suddenly ‘clicked’ one day, and I could read just about anything. Suffice it to say, the first year I could go to that Scholastics book fair with money in hand and the knowledge that I could read whatever I bought without any help was magical. So I got a VHS of The Haunted Mask (which I still have), and a goosebumps book with a pumpkin book light. I’m not going to lie, the book light was what sold it. I think I bought Welcome to Dead House. It was ’97, and Goosebumps was the series that all the kids were reading. The show had just launched, too, and I remember rushing home every day to watch it. There’s not usually a huge scare in the Goosebumps books. Most of them have ambiguously an happy ending (yes, the day is saved…but you’re a monster, or that sponge is going to wreak havoc when it gets wet again, or your dad might be one of the hundreds of plants in the front yard.) The next dark step up from Goosebumps was Ghosts of Fear Street, and then Fear Street when you were really ready for something ‘darker and more mature’. Something for the teenagers.

My point is that I got this collection as a gift, it’s amazing, and I’m pretty sure it could all be easily read in the course of a day by anyone of any age, and still feel just as magical as it did to me that day at the book fair when I bought my first Goosebumps.

Book(s) Of the Week: Monster Road

Posted in Books with tags , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 24, 2015 by ranranami

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Back in the 90s, I was wild for books. I still am, but the point here is that I devoured every book fair that came to school. Especially when it came to book lights and horror stories. Monster Road was one of my favorites. Perhaps it was the cover that drew me to it, or the fact that I’d run out of Goosebumps books, but this one was pretty easy to miss tucked back at the bottom ‘L’ shelf.

Written by David Lubar, Monster Road tells the story of Kevin taking a road trip with his eccentric scientist Uncle. Eccentric and wildly naive, every single monster Kevin’s uncle meets on the trip strikes him as something absolutely mundane and non-supernatural in any way. What’s more, he seems to come up with a solution for most of their problems in the process.

My old copy I had of Monster Road sadly fell to pieces, but that’s the sign of a well-loved book. At least for a kid. Monster Road is a great little story to read with your kid, or to just let them read on their own, lying in the somewhat sketchy area of 2nd grade – 4th grade reading level.

Hallow-Holics Podcast, Ep. 2: Children’s horror films

Posted in Media, podcast with tags , , , , , , , , , , on August 24, 2014 by ranranami

Bringing you another episode this week of our little podcast. This week we tackled a few darker children’s films, or at least family-friendly. Here is the archived episode:

Here is the video we mention in the episode: