The book (originally published in 1986) contains both pictures from the show and publicity photos, and contains bios of both the fictional Huxtable characters as well as the actors that portrayed them.

Eh. I’ve spent fifty cents on worse.

The simply named Ghosts is a very different book from Space Monsters. While Space Monsters focused on creatures from movies and TV shows, Ghosts focuses on specters from folklore. Simon records a lot of standard tales about haunted houses and ships and graveyards. One of the best stories is about the Nameless Horror of Berkeley Square, a Lovecraftian ghost that crawled out of the sewers in London to literally scare people to death. There are also poltergeists, ghost dogs, and various other apparitions in the book. There is even a photo of one such apparition, the Brown Lady of Rayhnam Hall.

And there are more pictures in the book than that. In addition to a few other photos and wood carvings, there are also several pieces of original artwork by Stephen Gammell, such as this one:

If the style looks familiar, it should. Gammell was also the artist of the Scary Stories series.

I honestly don’t remember if I read this book as a kid. There is nothing specific about it that I can remember as there was with Space Monsters. But it is a possibility. It is certainly the kind of thing I liked to read back then. And though it’s a little below my current reading level, it’s still the kind of thing I like to read today.

I found the Crestwood Movie Monster Series in my local library. For a long while, I didn’t make a trip to the library without taking one of these books home. They covered all the classics: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman, Creature From the Black Lagoon, and dozens of others. I think some gave a general overview of several movies, but the one I have today, The Bride of Frankenstein, gave a play-by-play of the movie. It was through books like this that I “saw” these movies when I couldn’t see them otherwise. This made them, like The Eerie Series, indispensable to the young and VCR-less.

There is a side-note to the Crestwood Movie Monster series, one that is very special to me. I had read the Bride of Frankenstein volume and had come to understand that this was perhaps the premier Universal horror movie, the greatest horror movie of all time. I wanted to see it very, very badly, but didn’t think I ever would. And then some Saturday when I was seven, a friend invited me to an activity at his church. He didn’t tell me what that activity was. He may not even have known himself. But I went. We had lunch there, played a few games, and then one of the leaders pulled out a movie screen. They then proceeded to show, complete and uncut, The Bride of Frankenstein from a 16mm projector. The Bride of Frankenstein! What I so badly wanted to see! At a church function! Who could have guessed? But they did it. I’ve always been thankful for that, and for some reason I’ve always felt that the Crestwood Movie Monster series was a part of that.

October Dreams is a “celebration of Halloween”. It contains short horror stories as well as memories from many well-known authors, including Dean Koontz and Ray Bradbury.

My favorite sections of the book are the memories. I think everybody who likes The Retroist will like the short anecdotes from the authors about their favorite Halloweens. Some of the stories are pretty good, though, as well, and they all center on Halloween. My favorite is Gahan Wilson’s “Yesterday’s Witch”, which seems so much like an anecdote that I wasn’t sure it wasn’t. This focus on Halloween makes the book a cut above other generic scary books and movies. You want something for Halloween that is actually Halloweeny, something you can’t really enjoy any other time of the year. And October Dreams is exactly that: Halloweeny. Thoroughly Halloweeny.