Once My Looks Go, I've Got Nothing

          It's October again, the leaves are changing colors, and if the latest Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer is any indication, people are really into pumpkin. Seriously, like 80% of that thing is ads for pumpkin-flavored foods. Now, this is cool with me, since I'm quite the squashophile myself. You may recall an article I wrote last year, about the release of the O.G. game-changing jack-o'-lantern carving book, Carve-O-Lantern (if you need a refresher, here's the link ). Seeing as how I just scratched the surface of the Carve-O-Lantern universe in that article, it's high time I wrote a follow-up where I can really give you the inside scoop on the product line. So, uh, here is that follow-up.      Indulge me for a moment in an extended simile: Carve-O-Lantern is like the popular trading card game Magic: The Gathering . It's true! Both are products that arrived on the scene relatively unheralded, only to become massive successes. Both are icons in their r

     As I continue my quest to present the world's most thorough and scholarly examination of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series of youth horror books (having already written Power Rankings articles for the first and second books as well as an opinion piece about the audio books ), I would be remiss to ignore another book that is closely related to the series in spirit if not name. If I'm going to write this series of articles, after all, I must do it correctly. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and all that.      So imagine: you're a folklorist that enjoys frightening children, and you're doing a pretty bang-up job of ensuring that the nation's youth can only slumber in nightmare-haunted fits and starts. But there's a problem: what about the particularly young children? The ones that can read but whose parents still shield them from imagery of blood-soaked corpses? What is to be done about them? The answer to these questions is fright t

Well, it’s April, the month of my birth. What more appropriate time than this to discuss terror and dismemberment? That’s right; continuing what I started here , it’s time for the next installment of " Scary Stories Power Rankings," wherein we take a look at the second book in the vaunted trilogy: More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark . Perhaps it’s just me (it usually is), but it seems that of the three volumes, More Scary Stories gets the least love. While I do not necessarily agree with this, I think I understand it, because this book is weird . I mean, obviously any collection of tales of terror retold from folklore is going to have an air of the unusual about it, but even by those standards, there is some absolutely off-the-wall batsh*t insanity between these covers. For a tiny taste of how twisted things get here, check out the dedication page: Yep, that’s a severed pig man’s head hanging on a clothesline. And he looks pretty god damned satisfied with himsel