RAZORWIRE PICTURES: Stephen Gammell

When I was in second grade, I was in a Barnes and Noble glancing through the children's books, when something caught my eye. It was Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, a collection of folklore retold by Alvin Schwartz with illustrations by Stephen Gammell. The stories themselves were classic campfire fluff, but what made them so creepy was the intense and disturbing artwork by Gammell. Needless to say I begged my parents to buy them for me. My friends and I were obsessed with these books and brought them to sleepovers, where we read them until the pages started to fall out. We even made our own ripoff versions, that we wrote and illustrated ourselves, photocopied, and then tried to sell to our classmates for a quarter a piece.

Since 1990 the American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom has received an enormous amount of complaints by parental groups and schools regarding The Scary Stories trilogy, which has made it the most challenged series of children's books in the ALA's history. Parental groups succeeded in making sure that the Garbage Pail Kids TV show never aired in America, so why not go after a popular book series that they felt was too scary for kids.

So on the 30th anniversary of the original book's release, publisher Harper Collins finally caved in to the decades of complaints, and tried to tone down the classic series by replacing the frightening illustrations created by Gammell, with the dull and timid drawings of hack artist Brett Helquist. Now a generation of children, will never feel the full impact of these books, and another classic has been destroyed by politically correct lunatics.

Gammell VS. Helguist:

So to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Scary Stories books, I thought it would be a good idea to pay my respect to the amazing artwork of Stephen Gammell. Since we're all so familiar with the Scary Stories drawings, I thought it would be cool to show off some of Gammell's lesser known horror-based artwork from some of his rare and out of print books that I've been collecting over the years.
Enjoy!

1. Ghosts by Seymour Simon (The Eerie Series) published in 1976 by J.B. Lippencott

6. Meet the Werewolf (The Eerie Series) by Georgess McHargue published in 1976

3. Meet the Vampire (The Eerie Series) by Georgess McHargue published in 1979 by J.B. Lippencott

4. Leo Possessed by Dilys Owen, published in 1979 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Inc.

5. The Ghost of Tillie Jean Cassaway by Ellen Harvey published in 1978 by Four Winds Press

6. Halloween Poems selected by Myra Cohn Livingston, published in 1989 by Holiday House.

Even some of Stephen Gammell's "normal" children's books have that persona of surrealistic nightmares:

Gammell continues to illustrate children's books in St.Paul. Minnesota, where he lives with his wife, Linda. His more recent works are in color and are much more playful than the illustrations from his black and white vine charcoal days.

Hopefully Harper Collins will re-release the original versions of the Scary Stories books, so that future generations of children can grow up with the same fantasy and intrigue that stimulated our imaginations when we were kids.

A Facebook page dedicated to that mission can be found here: BringBackTheScaryArt

There are a few other disturbingly ghoulish children's books that have (so far) remained untouched by censors - Check these out as well: