Happy Halloween!  I enjoyed the opportunity to get in the mood for Halloween by reading some books for the R.I.P. IV Challenge  hosted by Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings.  My goal was to read two, maybe three, books; and I met that goal.

First I read “The Dead Zone”, by Stephen King.  My post is here.

I read ”Frankenstein”, and as it turned out, this book was one of the Dueling Monsters Read-a-long, which made it easy for me to decide to participate in that read-a-long also!   I talk about “Frankenstein” in my most recent post.

I had planned to re-read “The Ghost-Feeler: Stories of Terror and the Supernatural” by Edith Wharton, but ran out of time.   It’s too bad, since “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” was a meomorably scary story for me.  However, I don’t read much horror; so this story may seem relatively tame to others?

I found “Nevermore: A Graphic Adaption of Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories” at the library, and of course thought of this challenge.

The adaptions in this anthology include:

The Raven

The Pit and the Pendulum

The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Black Cat

The Oval Portrait

The Tell-Tale Heart

The Masque of Red Death

A graphic biography of Edgar Allan Poe’s life is also included, at the end.

Each short story is adapted by different writers and artists.  Also, each episode is introduced by a brief summary of Poe’s original story.  It has been a long time since I’ve read Poe (maybe I should plan on re-reading Poe for RIP V !).     I found I most liked the adaptions that more closely followed the actual wording of Poe’s writings. 

In addition, these adaptions are done with a more modernisitic bent, instead of seeing characters in clothes from Poe’s period, for example.  Overall, I thought the graphic adaptions captured very well the dark mood of each story.  In fact, Poe’s works lends itself very well to black and white illustrations such as those in this graphic adaption.

My favorite adaption was “The Raven”.  Here is a page (photographed by myself) from “The Raven”, adapted by Dan Whitehead and Stuart Tipples, and art by Stuart Tipples:

I think “Nevermore” would be a good companion to Edgar Allan Poe’s works, especially if you like graphic novels.

I enjoyed participating in this challenge, even though I’m not really the type to participate in reading challenges, or scary books for that matter :-). 

Have you read anything scary recently to put you in the mood for Halloween?

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 11:59 AM and is filed under books, challenges, graphic novels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.