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.

Sleepy Hollow as a TV drama?

I have found this out of total chance yesterday night, on imdb: they made a TV series freely based (very freely based) on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. It is called Sleepy Hollow. It premiered yesterday in America and it is already a huge success. I watched the trailers, and there are so many things that could go wrong with it, that I would normally consider wrong... and yet I was watching them wishing I could see the first episode then and there. It will air a few weeks later in the UK. I had enjoyed the Sleepy Hollow of Tim Burton as an homage to the old Hammer movies I love so much, but the TV series is going somewhere else entirely. It seems to borrow heavily, from what I could see in the trailer, from Terminator. One reason why I think Still, in the weeks leading to Halloween, this seems to be the ideal guilty pleasure. A question to my readers on the other side of the pond: anybody watched it? How is it? Worth an hour of one's evening?