A while back, I commissioned a piece from my favorite video essayist, Poparena (creator of the Animorphs Opinionated Book Guide and the currently-running Nick Knacks). The essay went up today, about Alvin Schwartz’s children’s horror series Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and the illustrations by Stephen Gammell that truly brought those books to life.

Children’s horror stories were a big part of my early life as a writer. While Bunnicula by Deborah and James Howe will always be the one that stays with me, I have a lot of fond memories of staying up with my cousin reading Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and then subsequently not sleeping for days. Poparena does a great retrospective on how these books became popular, what their original intention was, and what they have to tell readers today, and I definitely recommend it.

(And if you would like to read my own take on ghostly media, you can check out my debut novel, The Traveling Triple-C Incorporeal Circus.)