Craving a good creepy tale

   
     So many of today's ghost stories leave me cold. They seem a cross between a schoolyard "gross out contest" and the unrelenting violence of graphic war reporting. Certainly they bring a sense of revulsion, a bilious shudder of nausea, but the spine tingling, who's-creeping-up-behind-me-while-I-read feeling seems to have disappeared. Where are those dreadful monsters we love to imagine, the things that could be lurking in every shadow, down every dark alley? I miss those delicious moments of shiver in your boots fear.
     Growing up in Michigan, I was treated to the ghosts, ghouls and goblins of Sir Graves Ghastly, the host of a classic horror movie every Saturday afternoon on local TV. (One of my favorite shows until I met my Waterloo in the film "Thirteen Ghosts", and never looked at a canopy bed the same way again.)  But for all Sir Graves' fierce and fabulous presentations, I still preferred the scares I met between the pages of Edgar Allan Poe, the Brothers Grimm or Washington Irving. There was something primallly terrifying in the creatures my own imagination called forth, that wasn't matched by the slightly smaller creatures of evil I could turn off with the snap of a dial.
    This Halloween season I find myself craving one of those good old fashioned tales of terror. I could satisfy myself with nicely turned out stories of R. L. Stine or Christopher Pike, but there's something missing -- something I can't place a ghostly finger (or bloody stump) on. Maybe somewhere down the dark aisles of my local library there's an unforgettable scare waiting to leap off the shelves, but I haven't found it yet. So while I wait for the next master of creepalicious tales to tap on my window some moonless night, I'll be curling up with a cup of cocoa and the irreplacable Tale of Sleepy Hollow.
     What are you reading this Halloween season?