Spooky Season: Hodgepodge and hereafter

The problem with the hodgepodge part of this post is that there are only two books left: 

Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths by Darren Naish

The Skull by Jon Klassen 

(For quantity, the "hereafter" part will make up for it.)

The Skull is a variation on the story where a traveler needs to spend the night in a haunted house. For younger readers, it's a good bridge between a picture book and a comic book, as well as being spooky but not too scary.

Hunting Monsters is really good, but something that will be hated by its target audience. It turns out that the harder you look at various famous cryptids, the less likely it is that they exist. 

If that doesn't surprise and dismay you (so, if you are more Scully then Mulder), then some of the history and psychology and even zoology can be really interesting. At times the thoroughness borders on pedantic, but overall I was glad that I read it.

(For a story that covers a lot of the same material on the Loch Ness Monster specifically, but with a more believing nature, visit https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-obsessive-life-and-mysterious-death-of-the-fisherman-who-discovered-the-loch-ness-monster?utm_source=pocket_shared.)

Remembering that it took me two years to get to where I could write about this spooky season, it may be foolhardy to predict too much about the next one. I will try anyway.

Sometime around last Halloween (October 2024), teachers of small children were looking at various seasonal but also age-appropriate picture books. One of the coworkers of one of my sisters remembered a book, but not the title.

In it, a girl believes her house may be haunted, but at the end you see shoes sticking out from under a sheet that made you suspect the girl's mother was behind the haunting. Did that sound familiar?

Not at all, but I did try some searches to see if I could figure it out.

While that did not work, I stumbled across another thread that helped someone find Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. I totally remembered reading that! Wait, was that the one with the owl with love in its eyes? No! There are some common threads, but that was The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. John. 

In searching for those, there was this list of best middle reader spooky books. It back some fun memories, but did not answer the original question.

Together, they made me really want to explore both picture books and middle reader books with spooky themes.

There are lists (and memories) for the middle reader books, but I wasn't sure how to choose the picture books. There is still a hope that I can find the one that started all this.

If you search the Washington County library system for picture books with the keyword "ghost" there are 272 results. 

When I found that out, I saw that there were also about 27 weeks until Halloween. I could do ten a week.

No, I am not going to read every single one. There are some that are familiar and some that are parts of franchises that I am not really interested in. It will still be a lot.

I am not adding them all to Goodreads. Many of them are fine, and I may pass many of them on to my sister, but I will only be reviewing them in Goodreads if there is something memorably good or bad about them.

So far that is mainly Ghost Cat by Kevan Atteberry, which hit home hard so I made both of my sisters read it and we all felt that one. 

I don't know if it will work for finding that one; that will depend on whether it is in the Washington County library system.

I do know that there will be lots of ghost books coming in and out. 

Boo! 

(There will also be the continuations of the series mentioned in https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-series.html. So if it does take me another two years, that will be why.)