Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful

Yesterday was a bad day for my convalescence; It was a 38 degree day outside, and inside my discomfort was such that I couldn’t settle, leaving me hot, cranky, frustrated and staring at my ceiling and my TBR shelves (they’re next to my bed). My eyes landed on this book late afternoon; we had it on our shelves growing up, and I’d bought a copy sometime back after finding out my mom had given away our original copy. It felt like just the ticket for what ailed me.

It pretty much was. Short stories for middle schoolers that were well written but untaxing. The book’s description and foreward claim that each of the stories are about haunted houses and ghosts – they’re not. One is Conan-Doyle’s The Adventure of the Red-headed show more League and that has nothing spooky in it except a sentence or two near the end. There were only two stories that had actual ghosts; the rest were mysteries that involved spooky houses. Still it was an effective method of distraction and entertained me as well as anything written for pre-teens possibly could. show less

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Title: Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Houseful
Series: ----------
Editor: Alfred Hitchcock
Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Children's Fiction
Pages: 262
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

A collection of short stories that purport to deal with haunted houses, things that go bump in the night and other such supernatural goings ons.

My Thoughts:

This was part of a “Young Readers” series put out with Hitchcock's name on it. He wrote an introduction to each book show more but each consisted of short stories by other authors. I think I was introduced to these when I was 10 or 11 and I loved them. This particular one I re-read because I own it and needed a paper book to read while on lunch breaks. Kindles don't deal well with sitting in a bookbag in sub-freezing weather for 8'ish hours.

Honestly, besides one story with a ghost and one story that involves a supposed haunted house, this book was more a collection of “boys adventure” stories than anything. Also, several of the stories are from other collections or novels. For example, one of the stories was the Sherlock Holmes “Mystery of the Red Headed League” and a long excerpt from “Tom Sawyer” that involved the story with Tom getting lost in the caves and finding treasure. Several of the other stories I am guessing were also parts of series that I simply wasn't aware of.

That doesn't mean they were bad stories, it's just that the cover is extremely mis-leading. I did find the Sherlock Holmes story too long and the same for the Tom Sawyer excerpt. They weren't nearly as short as the other short stories. I can easily see a 10 year old getting bored by them and putting the book down.

It helped lunch time pass tolerably well for a week or so, so I consider it to have succeeded at what I wanted it to do. I don't have any desire to go search out any of the other “Alfred Hitchcock's....” anthologies however.

★★★☆½ show less

Oh boy. This collection of short stories is clearly meant for very young children, but at the same time, barely half of them are even "scary" stories in any way. The longest is a Huck & Tom story from Mark Twain, and there is also a Sherlock Holmes story, neither of which have anything to do with hauntings or spooky situations. What's more, all the stories are VERY old fashioned, in a way that just isn't that fun to read.

Contains Jimmy Takes Vanishing Lessons by Walter R. Brooks, in poor condition