Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted Housefulby Alfred Hitchcock (editor)
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 0394812247
Publication Date: January 1, 1961
Pages: 208
Genre: Children's Fiction
Publisher: Random House
Nine short stories featuring haunted houses, by such notable authors as Elizabeth Coatsworth, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain.
Yesterday was a bad day for my convalescence; It was a 38 degree day outside, and inside my discomfort was such that I couldn’t settle, leaving me hot, cranky, frustrated and staring at my ceiling and my TBR shelves (they’re next to my bed). My eyes landed on this book late afternoon; we had it on our shelves growing up, and I’d bought a copy sometime back after finding out my mom had given away our original copy. It felt like just the ticket for what ailed me.
It pretty much was. Short stories for middle schoolers that were well written but untaxing. The book’s description and foreward claim that each of the stories are about haunted houses and ghosts – they’re not. One is Conan-Doyle’s The Adventure of the Red-headed League and that has nothing spooky in it except a sentence or two near the end. There were only two stories that had actual ghosts; the rest were mysteries that involved spooky houses. Still it was an effective method of distraction and entertained me as well as anything written for pre-teens possibly could.