Eerie Tales from the School of Screams (Family Comic Friday)

Today's homework assignment: tell an eerie story to the rest of the class.

Over the course of the rest of the school day, 5 children will try to top each other with spooky stories about a town that vanished, a curious ghost, a modern Cinderella being terrorized by her hateful uncle and aunt, a doomed crew aboard a spaceship, and the evil secret behind grandpa's massive stash of treats.

I don't know why it is, but I am so ready for Halloween. I'm slowly seeing things popping up in stores and it's just got me in the mode for cool crisp weather and spooky comics all of a sudden. Of the 5 tales, the one about the mistreated little girl was the most horrific because it was so real. The story about the vanishing village was just a warm up for things to come and the ghost story was more like something from The Twilight Zone, in that it was the twist ending that was the real spine chiller. I liked the outer space horror story. It had a couple of great jump scares and was smartly plotted. Then there was the story about Poppi's candies. It has demons in it and when it comes to horror, that's not really my thing. 

I would love for there to be a sequel to this 2023 anthology from First:Second. I'd also be up for a 1-hour animated special of Eeries Tales from the School of Screams. There was an element of frights on par with that classic series of horror stories from the 1980s, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Amazon has the suggested age range for the book as being for readers aged 8-12. I would slide that scale over a bit to the right and suggest it for youngsters who are a very mature 9 to 13 years of age. 

At over 300 pages, it's one of the bigger reads out there. However, there's not a ton of words. Creator Graham Annable utilizes completely darkened out pages to signal the progression of time. I know from Hitchcock's Psycho, that the greatest horrors occur in the mind of the viewer when events are left unseen. However, from a sustainability factor, those black pages, sometimes 3 to 4 pages in a row, are in my mind wasteful. From the view of my wallet, those extra pages aren't so bad as the book retails for $14.99.

A very good book with original stories ranging in level of scares from 1-9 on a 10 point scale. I hope to read another volume of this. Yet, if the ending is the way things stand with the story of the children of the School of Screams, I am perfectly fine with that decision.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.