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A review by easyqueenie
A World Full of Spooky Stories: 50 Tales to Make Your Spine Tingle by Angela McAllister
2.0
My penultimate Halloween read was another collection of short stories. A World Full of Spooky Stories by Angela McAllister promises 50 tales “to make your spine tingle” and includes traditional folk tales from all over the world. Each story comes complete with illustrations and a note about its country of origin.
It was interesting to learn about the myths and traditional stories from around the world and to note how similar many of them are to the traditional tales of Western culture—it’s hard not to compare China’s “The Maiden in the Pagoda” to Rapunzel or Russia’s “Vasilissa the Beautiful” to Cinderella. The book is divided into eleven sections which roughly group the stories by location and/or theme with titles such as “Into the Woods,” “Strangers at the Door,” and “Frozen Lands.”
Despite the interest from the global nature of the stories within its pages, this book ended up being a bit of a letdown. This was because, while interesting, none of the stories it contained were what I would consider to be “spooky.” While I wasn’t expecting anything overly terrifying from a book like this, none of the stories contained here seemed even a little spooky. Even tales I recognized and knew to be scary seemed to have been sanitized. Baba Yaga came across as more a grumpy old dear than a terrifying witch and the Scottish Water Horse was little more than laughable.
As a book of folk tales and interesting international mythology, this is a great little primer, but as a book of “spooky stories,” you’re better off looking elsewhere.
It was interesting to learn about the myths and traditional stories from around the world and to note how similar many of them are to the traditional tales of Western culture—it’s hard not to compare China’s “The Maiden in the Pagoda” to Rapunzel or Russia’s “Vasilissa the Beautiful” to Cinderella. The book is divided into eleven sections which roughly group the stories by location and/or theme with titles such as “Into the Woods,” “Strangers at the Door,” and “Frozen Lands.”
Despite the interest from the global nature of the stories within its pages, this book ended up being a bit of a letdown. This was because, while interesting, none of the stories it contained were what I would consider to be “spooky.” While I wasn’t expecting anything overly terrifying from a book like this, none of the stories contained here seemed even a little spooky. Even tales I recognized and knew to be scary seemed to have been sanitized. Baba Yaga came across as more a grumpy old dear than a terrifying witch and the Scottish Water Horse was little more than laughable.
As a book of folk tales and interesting international mythology, this is a great little primer, but as a book of “spooky stories,” you’re better off looking elsewhere.