Skip to main content

Some Horrific Reading - something to read for Halloween/Day of the Dead


The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde


The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.
 (Edgar Allan Poe)


Just in case you need a little scary reading. I'm a strong believer in personal reading choice to encourage reading. I look back and see all the books that I read in Junior and Senior High School, and the ones that I remember most are the ones that I wanted to read. So if your students are looking for a little horror or scary reading now, then lets support them in their reading desires and guide them to some good books that they might not have noticed before. We could show them the classics that everyone may have heard of, seen the movie, but may never actually read (ie books such as Dracula & Frankenstein), and then there are others from famous author but stories that they have never heard of  such as Robert Louis Stevenson "The Body Snatcher" or Robert E. Howard, who is famous for his Conan stories, but also wrote a number of frightening horror stories too (see Weird Tales).  If you want to go beyond text, you can even find a number of classic comic books, such as the Mr. Mystery series at Comic Book+ (search the page for "horror")

Here are a few collections that can be explored:
Project Gutenberg's Horror Bookshelf: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Horror_(Bookshelf) 
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis StevensonSteve Calvert's List of Classic Horror Stories (Public Domain): http://www.steve-calvert.co.uk/public-domain-texts/List-of-Stories.html 
Comic Book +: http://comicbookplus.com/?cid=1507 


Then of course if you don't feel like straining your eyes as you read a scary story, you can always listen to one in the dark. Try going to Books Should Be Free (now Loyal Books) and select from over 80 horror/scary public domain audio books that include classics like Dracula & Frankenstein and other works by Bram Stoker, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Robert E. Howard (and quite a few more). 

Loyal Books' Horror/Ghost Stories: http://www.loyalbooks.com/genre/Horror_Ghost_stories 

Dracula by Bram Stoker
 Horror Fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the audience. Historically, the cause of the "horror" experience has often been the intrusion of an evil — or, occasionally, misunderstood — supernatural element into everyday human experience. Since the 1960s, any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called "horror." Horror fiction often overlaps science fiction or fantasy, all three of which categories are sometimes placed under the umbrella classification speculative fiction.
—Excerpted from Horror Fiction on Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.

Book CoverLarge Thumbnail For Weird Horrors v1 #3Large Thumbnail For Mister Mystery v1 #1

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Auto Summarization

In dealing with textbooks and students with disabilities, one of the most common things that we would do is to get the textbook in a digital format, as an ebook. By doing this we were able to use a number of tools based on the need of the student. I've had students who could not lift their physical printed textbook, but would be able to access though a laptop installed in their electronic wheelchair, for students with vision issues we could boost the font size or use a text-to-speech tool to have the book read aloud to them. One tool that I used with a number of my students who had issues was the Auto Summarize tool in Word. The tool works well with textbook, but wouldn't work for other texts, such as novels.  I used this to reduce the amount of text that they had to read, the "cognitive load" of the text, but would still enable be able to get the information. Word did a great job, and depending on the student I would reduce the text to about 66% for facts and support...
7 comments
Read more

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks. Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text.  These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs. Poor highlighting design - too much text has been highlighted.  The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking ( to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be ...
1 comment
Read more

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 8: Textbook structure

Textbooks usually have a structure, and it doesn't matter if it is an electronic textbook or a paper printed one, the people who put the textbook together usually make it have a structure to help you better understand what you are reading and learning. Textbooks are usually a type of text known as informational or expository text - this is text written to inform, and can be things like textbook chapters, newspaper and magazine articles, and other reference materials like encyclopedia items. The other kind of text that you usually encounter in school is narrative text, where a story is being told - which could be fictional or non-fiction. And while textbooks are informational text, many will also have narrative text, usually as stories to help you better understand the concept, although in an English or literature class the stories are often more the focus of the learning. Textbook Elements With an electronic textbook it might be hard to see the structure, because you cant riffle...
Post a Comment
Read more