Oculus Presents: More bookses!

 

Greetings, everyone!

 

As I said in my last book-collecting post, I had a couple more books relevant to this blog on the way, and they arrived a few weeks ago, I was just a bit busy (read: lazy) to properly introduce these beauties.

Not that the one on the left needs an introduction, I think: it's an original edition of the first book in legendary Scary Stories series, which has been scaring the living bejezus out of American kids for generations now. Like many people, I'm not a super great fan of the more recent editions with the new drawings; I perfectly understand wanting to make these books more kid-friendly than the gnarly nightmares concocted by Stephen Gammell were, but the horrifying black-and-white watercolors were at least half of the charm of these books for me when I first encountered excerpts from them on the internet. Especially the drawing for the story called The Dream - yeah, I mean her. Hats off for spicing up my nightmares, Mr. Gammell. I've had my eyes on this book for a while now; and when it arrived, it was to my great delight that I saw: yes, it does contain the drawings. I won't review this book on the blog, because it's not rare or obscure at all, quite the contrary - but I can definitely appreciate it on my own.

The book on the right with the gorgeous cover, meanwhile, is a short story collection by the esteemed former horror author (I say former because as far as I've heard, she's mostly moved on to other genres lately) Kathe Koja. If you know anything about American horror literature history you know her: she is the author of the groundbreaking, legendary horror novel The Cipher, kickstarting the famed Dell/Abyss line of boundary-pushing horror books. For a while The Cipher had fallen out of print and became a collector's item, going for tens if not hundreds of dollars on the book market; but just last year Meerkat Press fulfilled every broke horror fan's dream and released a brand-new paperback edition of it, which I'm so buying next year. Until then, Extremities will be my first book of hers I'm actually going to dive into - the reviews on the back cover liken it to Poe and Calvino, two authors I love, so I think we're in good hands here.

Apologies for the quiet on the blog lately, I'm especially sour about not doing a Halloween-themed post like I said I would, but I do have something very cool planned to finish this year with a bang, so keep your eyes peeled in the next few weeks for new posts. Cheers!