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That’s horrible. The scariest thing about the new edition is that they thought it was a good idea to do this. I can’t stand how we seem to be dumbing everything down these days. God forbid something seem weird or scary - nope, can’t have that.
Yeah, I don’t get it. There are parents who have been complaining about how “scary” the original illustrations were for years, and the publisher never changed them. But now, for the “30th Anniversary edition”, which should be a celebration of the fact that the books endured for so long in their original form — suddenly, this huge, fundamental change. WTF?
These images used to scare the shit out of me as a kid, but I loved them for it. They fired my imagination because they were so otherworldly. That’s the only “scar” I carry from looking at them.
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I’m sickened. Truly sickened. I remember always being delightfully freaked out by those illustrations. There was one in particular that always stuck with me; ‘The Most Horrible Thing.’ Talk about the end of an era…
Yeah, it’s really sad. I’ve heard that they’ve even messed around with the font to make it more “Harry-Potter-like” (at least that was how I’ve seen it described…), which is just completely wrong for this series. The new style is all whimsical, like a book of fairytales; it doesn’t inspire terror at all. The original illustrations were so unsettling, and they resonated with the stories so much better. It was a perfect combination, and they broke it trying to “fix” it :(
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For the “30th Anniversary” edition of the Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books, publisher Harper Collins got rid of all the awesome, creepy-as-shit original artwork by Stephen Gammell, and replaced it with lame, “family-friendly” stuff. THIS BULLSHIT MUST NOT BE ALLOWED TO STAND.
The whole point of these books is that a kid can look at the pictures and get the crap scared out of them (even before any of the stories are read), but that it doesn’t actually harm them. Kids need to do things that scare them, sometimes. It’s good for them to get used to fear in a safe way (looking at unsettling pictures in a book of scary stories, for example), because the world is a big, scary place that they should be prepared for. If you shelter your kids from every little thing that could potentially upset you them, they’ll be jumping at shadows their whole lives.
