And Everybody Dies

I love a good scary story.  I love the chill that goes up your spine, the jumpiness when a door creaks, the urge to turn on a light after you have read a particularly spooky story.  This year I have been searching for a good collection of scary stories and one of the books I read in the never ending quest for a good scary story was Uncle Montegue's Tales of Terror by Chris Priestley.  It is a book of short stories, tied together by the over all story of Uncle Montegue and the stories he tells his nephew.  Here are some of my favorites in the collection.

Climb Not - A boy finds a strange tree on his new estate, and against all warning climbs it.  He is chased by an unknown presence and is ultimately killed.  This is the kind of story that I find scary, one where force is never seen, leaving me to imagine the worst.

The Un-Door - This story features the classic twist of the con-woman becoming the victim when a face seance team discovers that ghosts are real.  Our fake assistant/thief becomes trapped in a doll-house when a supposed fake seance becomes very real.

Offerings - Every parents worst nightmare comes true in this story of a sweet little boy who befriends a deamon.  When a preacher and his family move to a new town, their little boy turns from an innocent lad into a demon influenced killer.

The Gilt Frame- A story about a girl who finds her wishes are coming true in the most horrible of fashions.  This realization becomes even more horrific when she realizes that it is she, and not the girl in the mirror who is bringing this awful events about.

The Path - A boy who is becoming a man decides to leave his small village.  As he is walking up the hidden path, he realizes he is being followed.  He tries to out run this apparition, only to realize it is a bloody, injured, ruin of himself...which turns out to be a terrible foreshadowing of his own fate.

I read a couple of these stories to my Hubbin as we drove through the back roads in the middle of the night and the atmosphere was fantastic.  I found these tales to be moderately spooky, but at the same time a bit predictable.  I found it a bit crazy that in every story somebody died a horrible death...or became a monstrous killer...or both.  Over all the atmosphere, illustrations, and the writers tendency to kill people made this a decent Halloween read.  I give it 7 out of 10 demon bench ends.

What makes a story scary for you?  How do you feel about everybody always dying?  How dangerous is it to scare the person driving you around?

Everything You Wanted To Know About Dead Bodies, But Were To Afraid To Ask

Here is a little change of pace from my normal reading palette, a book called Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. This extremely funny, yet informative book gives us a glimpse of what happens to human bodies after they die. It starts off with a brief history of the human cadaver and its many uses in the advancement of science...and some not so savory uses.  She then goes on to detail various ways donated bodies are used. There is the most known and accepted use of organ donation and the all
encompassing "scientific research" categories, but she goes on to find a lot of other not so well known, but just as helpful uses as well. Ms. Roach does her best to actually go to the sites that these various procedures are carried out and asks questions a normal person would be dying to know.  She visits a plastic surgery lab where students must perform adequately  on cadaver heads before being allowed to touch a living face, a decomposition farm where bodies are placed in every imaginable environment to help police determine various times of death, talks with a man who used cadaver to do a "reenactment" of a plane crash to help determine what happened.  The list goes on and on.  The best part of this book for me was the real human curiosity and the perfect tone of humor the author brings.  She looks as it, not as a professional, but as a normal everyday person asking the questions we are all afraid to.  The foot notes in this book are the best part, they are hilarious and break up what can start to feel a little dark.  Ms. Roach always seems to treat the subject with respect without getting to macabre over the whole thing.  I would highly recommend this book to most people (unless you are really squeamish, then don't go near it) it is totally different from any other book I've read and pretty much is awesome.  I give it 7 out of 7 sugar skulls.

Do you think reading about dead bodies is something you should only do around Halloween?  How bad do you want to donate your whole body to science?  How do you come up with a topic like "what happens to dead human bodies" as a humor writer?