Friday, October 31, 2014

Books for a Scary Night

Thanks to my facebook friend Bonnie Gushard
for sharing this October ~ y vintage image
from The Graphics Fairy


Read Quickly:
The Circle
Gone Girl

Got Started:
Americanah
A Mother's Work
Someone Knows My Name
Super Sad True Love Story
Where Wicked Starts

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Thinking ahead to Christmas:
"It's the most wonderful time of the year . . .

There'll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago . . .
"
music & lyrics by Edward Pola and George Wyle

***************

. . . and this eerie yet charming passage
from A Child's Christmas in Wales
Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs where the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. . . .

One, two, three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door.

"Good King Wencelas looked out
On the Feast of Stephen . . . "

And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small, dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.
"Perhaps it was a ghost."

~ Dylan Thomas ~