I’d like to welcome a new face to the clubhouse, fellow blogger and Guest Contributor Ryne Barber from The Moon is a Dead World who joins us with a brand new Printed Perversion!
The ‘90s was the decade for young adult book series. Before Harry Potter had enchanted young readers, before Twilight turned thousands of children into Team Jacob/Team Edward undead, authors like R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike were churning out horror hits by the dozen, bent on converting a mass of new readers into young horror fanatics.
The most well-known of these series is obviously Goosebumps, spanning over a hundred books and six different incarnations. R.L. Stine is admittedly one of the reasons why I started reading so much during my formative years as a youngster, and I fondly remember days where I would sit around reading book after book (and one specific moment in time where a friend and I dragged my fifty-odd Goosebumps books into my bathtub – for what purpose, I have no idea).
But for all the good that Goosebumps did in creating new readers, it also served as a behemoth that was difficult for similar authors to overcome. Even if one read all of the novels in the Goosebumps series, there were still double that number that one missed out on.
That’s where the Graveyard School book series comes in, a set of twenty-eight young-adult horror novellas written by Tom B. Stone (a pun my ten-year-old brain found hilarious). These books started their publishing run in 1994, about the same time as Goosebumps, and were, unfortunately, overshadowed by Stine’s domination of the genre.
At the time, the Graveyard School series was difficult to find; I remember no book stores selling copies on shelves when I was a kid, and without the aid of Internet advertising, the books slipped by the wayside of many that would have been attracted to the colorful, eerie covers and prominent subject matter.
Fortunately, I happened to be a frequent library visitor as a child, and a chance visit with my grandmother allowed me to scare up the first two Graveyard School books, Don’t Eat the Mystery Meat! and The Skeleton on the Skateboard. The former was the real draw – a grotesque cover of an appetizing spaghetti and eyeballs entree, along with a deep, blood-red border.
Frantic, I hopped into bed, pulled the covers up close, and began racing through the pages. I was, to put it simply, the stereotypical, engaged reader, enraptured by the story; even now, I don’t think I’ve found myself as entranced by a book as I remember being back then. And when the book was finished later that night, the tough demeanor I had put on when picking out the books quickly crumbled into skeleton dust as I cowered beneath the sheets.
I haven’t had the chance to read any more of Tom B. Stone’s visceral novellas, but I can certainly remember what made the books so engaging to my evolving tastes in horror. As I previously mentioned, the first attraction was purely physical – my young mind never took to the adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” But I want to emphasize the actual content of the series as well. Graveyard School was based in and around the eponymous elementary school, and its storylines rarely deviated from student drama. The emphasis, then, was placed on the life of the child, and a fantastic, monstrous plot issued out of the day-to-day problems of those children. In a way, the Graveyard School series utilized many of the same elements that Goosebumps toyed with.
But the setting of the school also incorporated a sense of possibility for the young reader. For instance, Don’t Eat the Mystery Meat! required the main character, a student, to stop the devilish murders in the school kitchen before another child met their end only to be served to hundreds of famished classmates. In the proceedings, adults are either corrupt (the school faculty) or disbelieving, and so it is up to the children to save the day. The heroics of the characters translates directly to the young reader, and provides inspiration to the developing individual.
There’s also those brief, caustic moments of fear and violence that create dread in the reader. As a child, it was one of my first encounters with the gory facets of horror, and unlike Goosebumps, Graveyard School tended to drift towards vaguely-worded descriptions of death which put everything in a slightly more serious perspective. And though some might find the incorporation of death and gore inappropriate for younger readers, the appeal to children curious about the darker side of literature is cautious and refined.
Graveyard School, mostly overlooked in its time, has still not seen the recognition it deserves. One can purchase the novellas on Amazon for around $3, though, and it’s refreshing to see that the books are still floating around in library collections and homes. The push now towards mystical vampires, angst-filled witches, and romantically confused werewolves should not be seen as a bad thing, and I don’t necessarily mean any sleight against novels like Twilight, since they are ushering in a new wave of readers. But a step back to the old tradition of Graveyard School caters to young readers and the majority of their pubescent lives – school, and the terrors that public education can bring, not only with monsters but humans as well.
Guest Contributor – Ryne Barber
Ryne is a Creative Writing/Education student at MCLA. He writes about various forms of media that he’s interested in, with reviews of books, movies, and music strewn in with other facts about my day over at his blog: The Moon is a Dead World. You can also find him on Twitter (@ryneb).
