What's a Haunted House? (2/4)

 

Ok - let's just keep on going with more books and info about them!

Sorry about the heavy delay: I was very busy with school and some other day-to-day concerns.

The Gargoyles on the Roof - Poems by Jack Prelutsky and Pictures by Peter Sis

Prelutsky is one of the main inciting factors for my love of poetry, and Peter Sis is one of my brother's favorite illustrators of all time - the pointillism and prose in this book is outstanding.

A lot of what makes certain poetry pop is subversion of expectations - and this book has that in spades - along with enough detail to absorb and reflect and admire for many readings.

It takes a lot of tropes and gives a different interpretation of them - which is always a good start for making something good.

The Ghost of Sifty Sifty Sam - by Angela Shelf Medaris and illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers

This book is watercolor - it is a mixture of lurid and funny throughout, with a scared chef near cozy possums, a hungry ghost and a terrified chef  - but the surface is definitely scary- with looming shadows, insidious growing dread, a hungry ghost demanding food - tons of purples blues and greens.
It is great and we have two copies, it has always been very well read - and all of the pages are exquisitely illustrated.

Granny Greenteeth and the Noise In The Night - by Kenn and Joanne Compton

Oh man - I love the shapes and colors - the pattern of the story is a familiar X says Y to Z - which goes up a chain until the book resolves, it shows up in kids books quite a bit - this speak and response thing.
It's got lots of Halloween tropes, spooky stuff like ghosts and ghouls and bats.
This is a book I read from the library and bought my childhood copy when it left the library system, I bought it at a library booksale, which were so integral to my childhood.

Arthur's Halloween - By Marc Brown

Oh my god - the colors of the watercolors - the sharpness of the ink contrasted by the delicate colors and faded landscapes - the creaky houses and dim streets.
This is one of the books I have the most nostalgia for - I cannot get over the chocolate doughnuts and candy and evil masks and suits of armor - the haunted house, the scared faces of friends - it is all framed so perfectly and I cannot recommend it enough.

It feels strange being such a fan of this iteration of Arthur - this was early days, when he was still only a book - so to see him so round and simple and soft in the cartoons always felt weird as a kid - I really only read this Arthur book - and it is so different, Arthur is still an anteater - and the colors and subject matter and how they are handled is just so different.

The scene where they imagine a dungeon - an oven - Those are perfect drawings, and I cannot get over them, they just come circling back anytime I think about what is or isn't spooky.

Haunted House - by Jan Pienkowski with Assistance from Jane Walmsley and with paper engineering by Tor Lokvig

Tentacles and leaping skeletons and great vast bats - ominous portraits and black cats and great apes - ominous eyes and aliens and poison and crocodiles - ghosts and big beds and dolls and crates from overseas- all done with clear lines and good colors, the kind of colors where I can tell that whoever used them knew which color could stand by itself.
It is a spooky pop up book - it was one of the books at my grandparents house - and me and my brother read it a lot.

The Art of Hideshi Hino 

This book is responsible for me making my own Esses and thinking about using them in the ways that I use them in - it is also just visually stunning.

The pseudo amida sutra of a dreaming embryo - it is something I won't ever forget.

The idea of haunting things being specific - the idea of the eerie being ephemeral, coming and going - the brilliant colors and the faded worlds - trash and piles of forgotten things - bugs and worms and snakes and bodies and deformity.
A lot of this stuff is good as horrific visions - things that repulse and captivate - the kind of sights that shock a person into freezing - unable to look away.

Haunted House: A Slide-and-Peek Book - Written by Susan Van Metre, Illustrations by Nan Brooks, Design by Willabel L. Tong - and paper engineering by Intervisual Books Inc. 

Everything goes back to this almost - as a very young child I wrecked this book - I loved it to literal bits.

It has everything: a house that's haunted, fog, a witch, a ghost, pumpkins, candy, iron gates, the moon, a bare tree, shuttered windows, a light in the attic - AND THAT IS JUST THE COVER: The interior has so much more.

Broken windows, old glass decorations, streetlamps, black cats, spiderwebs, old furniture, peeling wallpaper, burnt out candles, old letters, mice, a suit of armor, creepy portraits, creaky stairs, a living skeleton, an attic door, a swarm of bats, more candy, a candelabra, a mummy, a coffin, kids being scared - it's got EVERYTHING!

I love this book to death - it is pretty close to my internal "standard".

Fritz and The Mess Fairy - Written and Illustrated by Rosemary Wells

The pink of the ghost in this book has always stood out to me - and when I made a ghost in a book I painted - it was pink.

There's a lot of complexity to that choice - the colors and gradient passes of watercolor - washes and faded paper - I love the way this book is illustrated.

The story is desperate - scary-ish - and the actual antagonist is subtly terrifying.

Poltergeists are really interesting - and this book basically has the main character summon one.

More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark - Collected from Folklore and Retold by Alvin Schwartz, Illustrated by Stephen Gammell

I don't need to say anything special: This book really scared kids.
I don't think I read it as a kid, I found this copy later, and I think I read it beyond the point of getting spooked by the art - But I've seen many people say that the art freaked them out.
It is ethereal - grey - dead and drawn out - sinuous and vile - hazy and foggy.
The biggest thing that sticks out to me is the art's ambiguity - the tendency for we, as viewers, to fill in the details, and conjecture what the thing is - and this is a very "Haunted House" quality.

Horatio Solves a Mystery - Written by Eleanor Clymer, Illustrated by Robert Quackenbush

I absolutely love Robert Quackenbush's art - he also illustrated another favorite of mine - I feel the same way, which is a book of children's poetry by Lillian Moore.

I like the furniture in this book - I like that it revolves around a mystery - it is spooky in a really understated way - with nearly empty rooms and a cat poking around - beautiful woodcut being stark and clear - and wonderful choices for the colors and shapes present. It is ambiguous sometimes whether it is night, day, morning, etc - which I love. 

Overall - the reason I connect this to haunted houses is because it has all the furniture for one - Lamps, old tall backed upholstered chairs, grandfather clocks, knitting equipment, ornate small tables, sixteen frame windows, curtains billowing in the wind - that is all the first page!
There is decorated staircase bannisters - measuring tape and glasses - wallpaper - framed pictures - and old oven - a strange jug - ornate doorknobs - a wall mounted mirror - tall and ominous beds - a fireplace - an old fridge - drawers and old wood doors - nine and twelve frame windows - an old decorated dresser - a vanity dresser with a mirror and curved drawers - wind in the trees - and tons of stripes, diamonds, hatches, and other patterns.

Bears in the Night by Stan and Jan Berenstain

Blue washes to convey darkness - yellow for lights.
Sneaking out in the night - Shortcuts and sneaking are part of houses - passages and routes and the emphasis on how to move - tiptoes and climbing and sneaky little steps - Passage through gaps and doorways - past landmarks and through one space into another.
Dark woods - lanterns - just lots of what I see as visual indicators of night and scary and it is really good, and done win a very clearly indicated way - there is something to learn from that.

Awful Ogre's Awful Day by Jack Prelutsky Paul O. Zelensky

Oh lord - I don't know where to start.
I'm just going to list cool stuff in this book that is "haunted"
Rats and snakes and eyes in the dark - bones and tapestries - fireplaces and small ornate chairs.
Mirrors - disgusting food - wind and rain and lightning - Rib bones.
Ivory doorknobs - axes and busts and organs draped in velvet - horrible overgrown dying gardens - too big or too small - skeletons skeletons skeletons. 
I love this book - Prelutsky's prose is unmatched - and the art is stellar, full of details and with the kinds of colors I like - I once had a sculpture professor that said I always used oops colors - and I really think that is accurate - I like colors that aren't quite right or unusual ones.

Owl at Home By Arnold Lobel
I love that in these stories there is just one person - Mr Owl - and often his experiences are colored by being alone - it is just him in the house. He thinks the wind and snow are a person - and the wind and snow invade his home. He sees bumps in his bed - and sleeps in the living room. He cries and cries and cries and drinks the tears. He goes up and downstairs looking for himself. He feels chased by the moon - but eventually finds the moon to be a friend - speaking to it all the while.
All these are spooky enough to me - they count as haunted things - because most of a haunted house is just a person's minds playing with them - eyes playing tricks, odd sounds out of proportion, strange glimpses into the self - the absence of others can color things as much as the presence of them.

The Littlest Pirate King by David B & Pierre Mac Orlan

A ship of the dead is a haunted structure - and the conceptual basis feels like something I should pay attention to. Why is the house haunted? What rouses the spirits? Why is the structure abandoned? What desires do the dead have? What do the dead do?
All these kinds of questions are explored in this wonderful comic book - full of very cool skeleton designs, who have a very interesting outlook and make some very interesting decisions.
Being dead and not being able to live - yet still being here on earth is painted as a tortured existence full of idiosyncratic and complex emotional states - and their effect on the living is really poignant.
I really enjoy this process - the structure gained from going and answering questions like "is the whole house an entity - or are there many ghosts?" "What is the inciting of this haunting - how did it get to this point?"

A lot of the questions of why and where and how ghosts and haunted houses get produced is a key way to make them the way your are aiming for, in my experiences and with the kind of goals I have in mind for a haunted house. 

PART 1
PART 2
PART 3
PART 4