More great books from my early childhood that made me bug-eyed with fear and joy:


MOVIE MONSTERS by Thomas Aylesworth
A who's who and (how they got so scary) book for primary school kids, published by Reader's Digest Services in 1975. I'm pretty sure my dad gave me this book just before my parents began letting me watch "Creature Double Feature" Saturday afternoons on Channel 56; simple but very informative writing with awesome black and white photos from all the Universal, Toho, and Hammer classics: King Kong, Godzilla, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Phantom, the Wolfman, The Fly, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing...there's even a chapter on the actors beneath the make-up. This book gave me a sneak-peek at all the screen gems I was about to watch with my hands in front of my face, peeking between my fingers. I think all this was when I was 6 or 7. This book was my Bible.



THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS by John Bellairs
Holy Moly, look at that cover. I totally remember my dad bringing this book home from Nettle school one Friday afternoon with a big pizza for supper (and I thought the horrible face of the clock was a drippy pizza-cheese-face-monster) and reading to my sister and me when we were little. Mr. Bellairs lived and worked in my hometown, and often visited my dad's junior high classes to talk about his career and to read from his works. His super-creepy novels were written for young adults, and most of them were illustrated by Edward Gorey. His first trilogy featured Lewis Barnavelt, his pal Rose Rita Pottinger, Lewis's Uncle Jonathan, and their neighbor Mrs. Zimmermann----books about witchcraft both good and evil, raising the dead, doomsday clocks, "Hands of Glory", ghosts, demons, all kinds of amazing creepy stuff. And the fictional setting of his "Johnny Dixon" novels was based on my hometown, so I always felt that crazy supernatural stuff could happen to little kids like me just walking down my own street.



THE FIGURE IN THE SHADOWS is the sequel to THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS , another doozy . Mercer Mayer did the interior illustrations for this one, though the great-great-great covers to these two books were illustrated by David K. Stone. My 32-year-old paperback copies of these gems are some of my most prized possessions.