Halloween Horror Stories

For today's countdown to Halloween post, I am blogging about a book I fnished recently, but it is not quite a reading suggestion, as I am not too sure about it, to be honest. So anyway, because Amazon knows me far too well, it suggested that I purchased Halloween Horror Stories by Christopher Ripley. As I am a sucker always on the lookout for a good scary seasonal read, I did just that. And I was underwhelmed by it. Firstly, because the vast majority of stories are mostly not Halloween related, but horror or not even horror classics that seem to have been gathered here arbitrarily. I am sure there is a rationale in this anthology, but the author does not explain it. It would be all right normally, but I feel vaguely cheated all the same. Most of the stories are classics which I could have purchased in different works, except two of them, which are from Mr Ripley himself. I somehow feel like he wrote two stories of his own (not bad ones themselves mind you, just not really outstanding either) and tried to sell them by cramming this book with things belonging to the public domain. On the plus side, I now have with this book a hard copy of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, the one story in the whole book that is associated with Halloween, at least implicitely. Then again, I could have bought this one by itself.