Stephen Gammell, freakish childhood nostalgia
By SleepingLesson 3 Comments
I don’t know how many of you (who am I talking to?) had those Scary Stories books as a kid, but I sure did.
If you don’t know, these were short books targeted at children, and contained a number of scary folklore stories. Though I haven’t read one in a long while, I vividly remember being legitimately scared of these stories as a child, and hiding under my covers to go to sleep after reading them.
The scariest part of these books was certainly the illustration. This guy, Stephen Gammell, did these simplistic yet grotesque drawings in the books that were really quite disturbing. I can only imagine this guy saw his pet rabbit ripped to shreds by a pack of wolves as a child or something. The illustrations were always sort of out of focus and charcoal-looking. I always thought he was playing off of the natural fear of the unknown, never really giving these morbid drawings fine details.
And there was always some weird substance dripping off of the figures...
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