![]() Parents periodically tried to get the “Scary Stories” volumes tossed out of school libraries. The drawings, like the stories themselves, were extreme enough to provoke some of the reflexive repression that the original horror comics did back in the ’50s. His drawings were over-the-top EC Comics visions given an elegant Victorian timelessness. You could call his style pop-art Francis Bacon, but it also owed something to the children’s-book illustrator Garth Williams (of “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little” fame). His melty black-and-white images of skeletons and corpses and rats and scarecrows and wounded bodies were at once fleshy and ghostly, like dreams with a quality of decay. ![]() Of course, much of the impact came from Stephen Gammell’s drawings, which were jaw-droppingly horrific for the illustrations in a book aimed at children. ![]() They had a subversive wonderstruck creepiness intertwined with a weirdly comforting morality. If you were a kid growing up in the ’80s or ’90s and you read Alvin Schwartz’ 1981 spook-tale collection “ Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” (or its two sequels, published in 19), you may have felt like the stories added up to your own private “Twilight Zone,” to be consumed with a flashlight under the covers. ![]()
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