“There are no such things as humans. They are only make-believe.”

Today we continue our spooky exploration of the Sleep-Overs anthology series with Volume 2, written by QL Pearce, who took over basically the entire run of the series until the Mega Scary Stories add-on. I talked to her online once. She’s a very sweet lady.

Anyway, I was excited as a kid to learn that this series was continuing, and couldn’t wait for new volumes. Pearce continues the stylistic tradition begun by RC Welch in the original Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs, but the big question is, do her efforts hold up as well as those of Welch?

More Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs is definitely more of a mixed bag than the original, there’s no denying that. When Pearce nails it, she does a good job, and she’s just as capable as Welch in the atmosphere and tension department. These aren’t Goosebumps stories by a long shot, but there’s a certain dark edge to Welch’s work that is absent here.

I guess the best way to describe the difference between authors is that, while they’re both good at telling stories to frighten young readers, Welch is willing to steer into the gruesome and grotesque, while Pearce tends to steer away from it. You won’t find any gouting blood in Pearce’s stories like you do in the works of Welch, but they can still chill you to the bone. Welch’s horror-heavy work definitely feels more like Tales from the Crypt, whereas Pearce is more Twilight Zone: her stories are just as likely to be science fiction, fantasy, or just plain weird as they are to be traditional horror tales.

I never liked the artwork for this collection. The art in the first volume was sketchy high school art contest fare. Here we have a new artist, Bartt Warburton, whose illustrations look like pencil sketches for a collection I have since dubbed, “Terror in Kewpieland.”

The humans all have unnaturally mannequin-like heads and faces, and the bonkers anatomy of human and monster alike is borderline funny. These pictures feel like they belong in a collection of silly stories meant to make kids laugh. Only a couple of them are remotely creepy.

Like this one. This one is pretty scary. I can’t decide if the unnatural face of the mannequin girl makes it more so or less so.

This one’s not too bad for what it is. There’s a real sense of panic and doom here. It’s the first image of the book, so it sets you up to think, “okay, the art isn’t too bad in this one.” But then the rest of the artwork features those goofy doll people heads, and, well…

Compared to the first volume, I don’t think More Scary Stories is quite as consistently effective as the original, but that might be more of a personal taste thing. On its own, it’s a pretty decent collection. There’s a lot of variety, and some of these shorts are genuinely frightening. If you only ever read one volume of the Sleep-Over series, you could do worse that this one.

Time for everyone’s favorite segment, where I spoil, ridicule, and over-analyze the contents of each story in the anthology. At the end of each review, I’ll include what I think the moral of the story is, as the best horror stories have morals, or so the theory goes.

If you haven’t read this collection yourself, I highly recommend doing so before you continue with this segment. Scary shorts are much more effective when you experience them on your own. The in-depth review portion below is mainly for people who want a trip down memory lane, or can’t remember where they read a particular story.

Swimming Lessons

SUMMARY: Heather can’t swim, and has a fear of the water ever since she nearly drowned in a public pool. Her fears are worsened by her mischievous grammy, who told the poor girl stories about water monsters who like to drown people. So when Heather’s family goes to a cabin at Crocker Lake for the summer, she is not thrilled. Her siblings, Andy and Amanda, love swimming and boating on the lake, but she refuses to go. When she meets Mr Patterson, the caretaker of the lake cabins, he warns her to steer clear of the currents near the lake’s island: they sucked down and drowned several kids a while back, including Deputy Anne Taylor, who drowned trying to rescue them. He punctuates this with the terrifying Indian legend that people who drown in Crocker Lake become malevolent spirits.

Andy and Amanda finally talk Heather into taking a boat ride out to the island, and sure enough, the current seizes the boat and threatens to capsize it. To Heather’s horror, that’s when she sees the figures standing on the water near the island, who swim after them and tip the boat. Heather is the only one who makes it back to shore, rescued by Mr Patterson. Still in shock, Patterson has a local police deputy take Heather to the station. But when the deputy begins leading her back to the lake, Heather recognizes the name “Taylor” on her uniform too late: she’s being reunited with the drowned Andy and Amanda, who take her out for a night swim.

THOUGHTS: This is a strong opening to the collection, and one of my favorites. Heather gets a triple-whammy: she can’t swim, she’s afraid of the water due to childhood trauma, and she keeps hearing stories about water monsters that kill people. Nothing scares this girl more than being in or near the water. And just when she starts to overcome her fear a little bit, the worst case scenario rears its ugly head and gets her. Lots of kids are afraid to swim, and I bet this story scared the pants off of them. The first appearance of the water demons is chilling as they stand on the surface at a distance, watching the kids before quietly slipping beneath the waves. Good stuff.

MORAL: Don’t give in to peer pressure.

Wish Fulfillment

SUMMARY: Greg is a spoiled, unpleasant little brat who is impossible to please because he wants to be treated like a prince. He’s instantly bored with the school field trip to the museum, and keeps bragging about how he’s gonna be famous someday. His classmates quickly get fed up with his griping and boasting, and he finds himself left behind as the class heads off to the King Tut exhibit.

At a weird exhibit about a giant stone head, the sign says “don’t touch,” but Greg does what he wants, so he touches it and gets bit by the statue. This summons a genie from the big stone noggin who begrudgingly offers Greg three wishes. Greg wastes one before wishing to be the richest boy in the world, and also the most famous. He gets turned into the long-dead King Tut, around whom his classmates are gathered in awe. Greg gets what he wants…and now he’s trapped in a mummy forever.

THOUGHTS: It’s an okay story with a pretty awful fate when you really think about it. Greg’s consciousness is doomed to sit in that casket, slowly going insane. On the bright side, this idiot would probably have grown up to get somebody killed, or become a Gavin Newsom level politician, or something equally awful, so no big loss. Overall it’s not mind-blowing or scary per se, but at least the brat gets what’s coming to him.

MORAL: Every narcissist should be locked in a box. And speaking of boxes…

The Box

SUMMARY: Tad is playing Hide-and-Seek with friends in the neighborhood, and has caught everyone except his bosom buddies Dave and Scootch. The trio sometimes explore the swamplands on the town outskirts, and he figures that’s where they’ve hidden. He quickly loses interest and decides to torment some of the wildlife instead while musing on the local Indian lore about weird long-faced demons that came from the stars. As he’s thinking on this, Scootch and Dave come find him, saying they’ve stumbled upon something weird in the swamp: an ancient passage almost completely hidden by thatch and vines, with stone stairs descending into darkness.

The boys go downstairs to see if there’s anything worth exploring, finding a cavern covered in slime and rot, with a strange metal box on a stone slab in the center. Surrounding the box is a string of rutoo shells left by the Seminole Indians long, long ago. The shells contain the spirits of dead ancestors: knowing this, Tad deduces they are meant to prevent something in the box from getting out. With some goading from the skeptical Dave, Tad picks up the box, breaking the seal and sending the spirit ancestors into a panic. The cave comes alive, and the ancient ship buried under the marsh comes back online, releasing the alien visitors suspended inside. They immediately kill the kids and summon reinforcements to decimate the earth.

THOUGHTS: This one has a superbly intense buildup in the first two thirds. The voyage through the marsh is literally dripping with atmosphere, and the discovery of the box is ominous and foreboding. I got a really spooky image of that strange box surrounded by Seminole charms in that dark, forgotten cave, and when they break the seal, the desperate cries of the ancestor spirits is probably the most frightening thing in the whole story.

Then it quickly turns into Mars Attacks! with bap-bapping big-headed aliens shooting the kids with rayguns, and a perspective-hop to their leaders lightyears away, who wonder why they’re suddenly getting a signal from those idiots that crash-landed on earth millennia ago. Must be a dangerous planet. Better go kill it! Womp-wommmmp.

I think the reason this ending doesn’t work is it shows too much. The aliens are too human-like and stereotypical in their advancement. Something more incomprehensible in a Lovecraftian vein would have been more effective. The perspective switch is the final nail in the coffin, taking a genuinely spooky story and demoting it to My Teacher Is an Alien. Without that, it still would have been a bit of a weak ending, but without completely derailing the whole story.

MORAL: When in doubt…aliens!

Green Thumb

SUMMARY: Leah is good with gardening. She’s even concocted her own special soil in the back lot of the farm house that makes plants grown absurdly fast! When she finds an ad for a strange new plant in a magazine, she immediately orders the seeds and adds them to her garden of green wonders. A strange twitching vine with blood red bell flowers sprouts in less than a week, but it has a habit of ensnaring and eating crickets. The vine quickly grows out of control and covers the barn, and it even bites Leah at one point. When Leah’s kitten goes missing, she’s convinced the vine ate it, and asks her dad to uproot the whole thing and burn it, which he does. Problem solved.

Later that night, Leah hears strange noises behind the wall, near the back lot where her special soil is. Thinking her kitten has come back after all, she goes out with a flashlight to retrieve him, and discovers that the old vine somehow cast its seeds into her special soil: a new vine now overruns the wall around the house, and promptly devours Leah before it spits more seeds to be carried across the countryside.

THOUGHTS: It’s hard to make a plant creepy, but Leah’s red bell vine fits the bill perfectly. The sight of the thing is already ominous with its twitching, curling little tendrils and its blood red flowers. But it also emits a chilling, whispering moan to announce its presence, and that’s probably the most unnerving thing about it. Well, that and the fact that it eats bigger things the bigger it gets. Have to wonder who was selling this horrid thing in a magazine ad in the first place.

Pretty good story overall. The plant is scary, and the stuff with the kitten fills you with dread. You know that kitten is going bye-bye. The payoff at the end is chilling, too, with Leah hopping the wall late at night in search of her cat…right into the waiting arms of that awful moaning vine.

MORAL: Mail-order goods are a scam. Especially weird seeds and x-ray specs.

Nightmare

SUMMARY: Todd and his friends read Monster Madness magazine because they’re obsessed with horror culture: scary movies, creepy legends, and the like. Todd is good at inventing scary things, too, and improvises a legend about a furry beast with a long, sandpapery tongue for licking flesh off of bones. Todd claims the stuff doesn’t really bother him, but today he can’t shake the feeling that something is stalking him and his friends.

That night Todd wakes up to the sensation of a sandpapery tongue licking his ankle, and he engages in a life-or-death fight with the very monster he cooked up on a whim. It’s killed his parents in their beds, and is in the process of killing him when he cuts the beast with a pair of scissors. The beast wakes up from this nightmare crying, as his beastly parents assure him there are no such things as humans.

THOUGHTS: I’ve read stories like this before, where the main character turns out to be a monster the whole time. The annoying thing about this take is, it could’ve been really clever! There’s no logical reason for the perspective switch. I guess the idea is that the monster kid is dreaming about his victims, but it would’ve been much more effective if all of the kids were actually monsters, and Pearce had just used some narrative trickery to make us assume they were human. Good idea, poor execution.

MORAL: Horror people are annoying and will only hurt you.

What’s the Matter With Marvin?

SUMMARY: Robbie has moved in with his Uncle Lester and cousin Marvin after a tragic fire killed his parents and left him with a scar on his chest. He still has nightmares about the fire, but even more troubling is Marvin, who is aloof at best and hostile at worst, and Robbie can’t understand why. Uncle Lester is weird, too, and keeps hovering over Robbie as he does simple things like eating breakfast. One day Marvin has a sudden outburst at Uncle Lester, demanding that he tell Robbie the truth so he doesn’t find out the hard way. Neither Marvin nor Uncle Lester explains what this means.

Since no one will give him answers, Robbie decides to find them himself, and sneaks into Uncle Lester’s garage-cum-workshop. There he finds Marvin’s severed head on a table, and his headless body leaning against a wall–Marvin is a robot! As Uncle Lester corners Robbie, he begrudgingly explains that Marvin was a mildly successful prototype he had meant to replace with a newer, improved model. The memory of the fire and the dead parents were implanted in Robbie to explain his presence in Lester’s home, and as Uncle Lester explains this, he inserts a screwdriver into Robbie’s chest scar, which pops his chest open to reveal blinking lights and mechanical innards.

THOUGHTS: This is my favorite title, I think. It grabs you right away. The story itself is all right, and does a decent job building a sense of mystery around Marvin’s strange, hostile behavior. I think even as a kid I started to figure out what was going on before the reveal at the end, but it’s not a bad yarn. Not particularly scary, but it keeps you interested all the way to the end. Definitely more of a Twilight Zone -esque short than the others, and I’d almost put it on par with The Doll House from the first anthology.

Actually it is kind of chilling to think about the existential implications of finding out the life you knew was all a lie….”you were a secret robot” thing notwithstanding…

MORAL: Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Crying Wolf

SUMMARY: Anne is weird and overly creative, to the point where she might even be schizophrenic. She loves writing stories and telling her friend Byron about all her strange conspiracy theories, like whether the school janitor is really a vampire or not. During one of their hangouts, Anne thinks she sees something move in the corner of her eye, but there’s nothing there. Byron tells her it’s just an optic illusion, but already he knows she’s got a new theory brewing in her crazy little head.

Sure enough, throughout the week Anne looks increasingly sleepless and erratic for fear of the “gremlins” that hide just out of sight. She insists that she’s in danger because she knows what they are, and they might be after her now. She’s got injuries on her skin and footprints on her homework to prove it! Late one night, Byron is worrying himself sleepless about her when he sees her bedroom light is still on next door. He sneaks out to go visit her, and gets a split-second glimpse of a terrified Anne being cornered by small gremlin-like creatures before the lamp breaks and the lights go out. He goes back to his room before his parents realize he’s gone, but now he’s seeing movement in the corner of his eyes…

THOUGHTS: This might be the scariest one in the collection. As a young reader, it really makes you paranoid about those optic illusions that might actually be little demons after all. It’s a cinch that no one believes Anne because she’s clearly crazy, and when Byron gets that brief glimpse of the truth before the lights go out, it’s horrifying, especially when he begins to wonder if one of them didn’t turn and spot him at the last second. Even creepier, when Anne’s parents bust into the room moments later, the room is empty! One of my favorites from this collection, and from the entire series.

As a side note, the story opens with Anne’s theory that zookeepers are really animals in human form, and I have to wonder if this is a nod to one of RC Welch’s Twisted Tales, where the opposite turns out to be the case. Funny either way.

MORAL: Listen to the conspiracy theorists. They know what’s up.

No Laughing Matter

SUMMARY: Gordy runs a school gang called the Jokers, who like to bully and prank people for fun. Nobody stands up to them…until the new kid Rick gets fed up with their nonsense and almost picks a fight with Gordy. A dare follows: Gordy will publicly apologize if Rick goes into the old Banwell house at night and stays there for an hour. Banwell had been an eccentric recluse, and possibly a warlock, who was found dead in his front yard with a look of horror on his face. In fact, many horrific legends surround the Banwell house: Banwell’s daughter was found wandering the woods out back in a catatonic state, her hair white as a sheet; a local boy’s headless body was found sitting on the porch; and there have been reports of strange lights and horrible moans coming from the house at night. Rick agrees to the dare, if only to show up Gordy’s stupid gang of stupid bullies.

The day of the dare, the Jokers rig the Banwell house with stuff like fake blood and dead rats, hoping to scare Rick into quitting the dare in the first five minutes. The piece de resistance is Gordy’s tape recording of a shambling, moaning thing creeping up the hallway. That night, Gordy explains the creepy legends of the house to Rick before sending him in through an open window. The moment the tape recorder starts up, Rick is outta there. But now no one wants to go in and get the tape recorder for Gordy, so Gordy goes in to get it himself…and meets the moaning, shambling source of all the house’s legends.

THOUGHTS: It’s not a bad Crypt style story, with a mean protagonist getting his just desserts. The thing I like most about it is the story behind the Banwell house: there’s no single haunting incident like in many YA haunting stories. Tons of bad stuff happened there, and the further into the narrative you go, the more unsettling incidents you learn about. The Banwell house is a buffet of nastiness, and it all comes together at the end when Gordy comes face-to-face with what drove the Banwells mad and decapitated that poor kid. I have to imagine they found Gordy’s headless corpse sitting on the front porch the next morning like he’s just waiting for the bus.

MORAL: An apology isn’t worth a dare. Especially if it involves a spooky house.

Family Ties

SUMMARY: Junior college students have been going missing around Jamie’s neighborhood over the past few months, but that doesn’t deter her from starting her own business and stuffing fliers into everyone’s mailboxes. She figures it’ll be safe since her parents screen whoever calls to hire her. Her first client is Mr Hubbard, a historian at the junior college who needs someone to tidy up his historic home while he’s at the office. Jamie comes over regularly to tidy up despite all the weird goings-on, and discovers an antique ring with a T on it, and strange noises coming from the basement that scare her back home.

Jamie researches the ring and learns about Baron Trouvese, a supposed vampire who was blamed for the disappearance of several children in Eastern Europe, and was supposedly destroyed by the locals. The pictures of the Baron bear a striking resemblance to Mr Hubbard, convincing Jamie that Hubbard is in fact Baron Trouvese, preying on the youth once again. She goes back to the house to get the ring as proof, but is cornered by Mr Hubbard, who lays her fears to rest about him being a vampire. He was indeed related to the Baron, but he is as human as Jamie. Then he feeds her to the real Baron Trouvese lurking in his basement.

THOUGHTS: The only good point in this story is the few unnerving paragraphs of Jamie alone in the house, hearing sounds in the basement. Beyond that, it’s a predictable and illogical farce. What good would the ring be to anyone if she recovered it? It wouldn’t prove anything about the existence of vampires. And why would Jamie work for Hubbard anyway? Why would her parents allow her to work for him? He works at the same college that students are disappearing from! Steer clear of anyone with any ties to that college!

MORAL: Don’t let your parents screen your callers. Stick to professionals.

Nine Lives

SUMMARY: Jason and Steve are gamers who love video games, but lately Steve has been distant. When Jason finally sees him again, he’s a bundle of nerves who clearly hasn’t slept in a while. Steve asks Jason for help with a game that he got from a new shop in the town market, one which replaced the old game store that burned down a while back. The strange thing is, the new shop only had one game–called Nine Lives–and the shopkeeper let him take it home for free, and when he went back to the shop later it was just a burnt out husk again. The game won’t let him stop playing, and attacks him in the real world, and every time he loses a life, someone close to him dies!

Jason agrees to help Steve out of his predicament by joining the current game as a second player. He, too, struggles with the game’s challenges, which include a skeleton dragging him under his bed in real life. He loses a life, and his pet iguana dies; the next life he loses causes a beloved uncle to die in a tragic accident. Jason and Steve take the kid gloves off and go back to the weird game shop for a showdown with the sorcerer who made the game: apparently he designed it to steal people’s souls. They somehow defeat him and reset the game.

THOUGHTS: The premise for this one is actually pretty good: a video game that costs real lives whenever you lose one in-game. But it just isn’t fully realized. Sometimes Jason deals with challenges in the actual game on his computer, and sometimes they attack him in real life (admittedly the skeleton under the bed is, in theory anyway, a pretty cool bit). There’s no real reason for a sorcerer to be stealing souls with video games, unless it’s supposed to be an allegory for the soul-consuming nature of the growing video game industry. If that’s the case, it needed a few more rewrites. It’s a great idea for a story, but published in first draft status.

Maybe Pearce could’ve restricted the game to its own medium, so the game itself seems harmless, yet it’s clearly causing people to die in real life. The mix of computer stuff and real life fantasy stuff feels half-baked and unsure of itself, and not knowing who designed this game, nor why, would have been better than making the villain a generic wizard.

MORAL: Go outside once in a while.

The Lesson

SUMMARY: Jessy is tired of her brother Ted tormenting her all the time, and she’s tired of being gullible and easily tricked and pranked, too. When she declares one evening in her bedroom that she would give anything to teach her brother a lesson, she hears a rapping at her window. Someone answered her prayer, apparently, but it isn’t God: it’s a giant, hairy, yellow-eyed, evil thing crouching beneath her window, sweetly coaxing her to open up so he can tell her how to get back at Ted. In a temporary lapse of good sense, Jessy keeps her window shut, so the thing offers to give a demonstration the next day as a show of good faith. She tells Ted about the monster at her window, but he just makes fun of her.

The next day, Ted gets everyone at school to laugh at Jessy about the monster thing, and it’s all fun and games until a giant, hairy claw reaches out of the bushes and causes him to crash his bike. That night the thing visits Jessy again, and again asks her to open her window so they can plan how to really teach Ted a lesson. The ever-gullible Jessy gives in, opens her window, and is promptly eaten.

THOUGHTS: A weird and nightmarish tale to close the anthology on, and it doesn’t disappoint. You might ask yourself, who in the world would trust a big, hairy, evil monster enough to let him into their bedroom? But Jessy would, because Jessy is a gullible idiot, as her brother so often reminds her. The mental image of the giant hairy yellow-eyed thing crouching beneath Jessy’s window while calling sweetly to her is absolutely terrifying, even if there’s no explanation for where it came from. All the more reason not to wish ill on your fellow man, because you don’t know what may come calling to grant that wish.

I’m left wondering what the monster would have done if Jessy had told it to bugger off. I can only assume it would have gone to Ted’s window next and been like, “Psst, hey, wanna really scare your idiot sister?”

MORAL: Don’t wish harm on others. Or be gullible.