More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I found the stories in this second volume of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories series to be less memorable or interesting than the stories in the first. Still, one story stood out above the rest for me, and maybe even above the stories in the first volume: “The Drum.” It’s about two little girls, sisters, who find another little girl in the middle of a field playing with a drum, out of which come a little mechanical man and woman. The sisters are so taken with this drum that they ask if they can have it. The girl tells them she will give it to them only if they act really bad at home, which they do, drawing on the walls, breaking dishes, even beating the dog with a stick (monstrous!). Their mother begs them to stop, threatening to abandon them to “a new mother with glass eyes and a wooden tail” if they don’t. But the girls don’t stop, the other girl never gives them the drum (“I never meant to give it to you. It’s just a game we were playing. I thought you knew that.”), and of course waiting for the sisters at home at the end is their new mother. There’s something so eerie about the dream logic (or really, nightmare logic) of this story that it got under my skin and stuck with me.
As for the other stories, they’re easily read and quickly forgotten, at least by this reader, who is admittedly way too old to be reading these books. But as a friend of mine pointed out, the books are really about Stephen Gammell’s beautiful, creepy illustrations. If I were a small child, those illustrations would scare me a lot more than the stories would. Anyway, on to the third and final volume!
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