Short, Sweet, and Scary: How Bruce Coville Introduced Me to the Horror Anthology and Changed My Life
If my cousin Duffy had the brains of a turnip it never would have happened. But as far as I’m concerned, Duffy makes a turnip look bright. My mother disagrees. According to her, Duffy is actually very bright. She claims the reason he's so scatterbrained is that he's too busy being brilliant inside his own head to remember everyday things.
Maybe. But hanging around with Duffy means you spend a lot of time saying, “Your glasses, Duffy," or "Your coat, Duffy," or–well, you get the idea: a lot of three-word sentences that start with “your" and end with "Duffy," and have words like book, radio, wallet, or whatever it is he's just put down and left behind, stuck in the middle.
Me, I think turnips are brighter.
– “Duffy’s Jacket” by Bruce Coville,
from Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters
When I was eight years old, my mom came home from the city where she had been visiting her mother one day and dropped a book in my lap. I remember startling from my lounging position on the game room couch–which still reigns supreme as the ugliest couch I have ever seen in my life–and looking down to see a tattered paperback staring up at me.
Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters.
“Have fun, Morticia,” she told me–she’s always called me that, and I find it hilarious I apparently skipped straight past a Wednesday phase and instead was Morticia from childhood–with a little laugh.
(She was more enthusiastic about entertaining my interest in the spooky and strange once I’d grown out of my weird habit of tearing up pictures of her and putting them under my pillow when I was upset like I’d done as a toddler. Go figure.)
The book’s cover, an illustration of a young boy hiding under his covers reading his own copy of the Book of Monsters while one lurked just behind him, caught my eye immediately. So did the pages sliding out from their places and onto the carpet at my feet, their cheap bindings having given up long ago. Once I’d picked up the loose pages and gotten them back in order, I began skimming the story most of them had belonged to: “Duffy’s Jacket,” written by Bruce Coville himself.
Well, I say skimmed, and that was absolutely the intention. But as soon as I read the first handful of lines, I found myself engrossed in a surprisingly funny short story about a couple of children desperately trying to hide from a monster lurking in the woods, with a twist ending that made me laugh out loud.
Twenty-five years later, I can still remember the opening passage of “Duffy’s Jacket” verbatim. Not because I memorized it all those years ago, but because I reread Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters just about every year–my own copy, not secondhand, but from a box set of four that I got for Christmas that year once my mom realized that she had created a monster, so to speak, and that I was obsessed.
I have an annual reread of the other books that came in Bruce Coville’s Box of Thrills and Chills (the Book of Ghosts, Book of Nightmares, and Book of Aliens, respectively), too. She also got me an additional book that was out along with the original four in the set, the Book of Nightmares II, which quickly replaced the Book of Aliens in the box because I just didn’t care much about aliens at that time in my life.
The love I have for these books is visible from across the room. The box itself has been taped back together more than once, and each book has several spots where the pages have come loose and require careful handling to maintain the illusion of structural integrity. I have sticky tabs marking my favorite stories for my own reference, most of which I put there before I was out of elementary school.
I struggle to find something to compare these books to when it comes to content and tone. Some of the stories are silly, yes, but some of them are genuinely profound, despite (or maybe due to) being geared toward kids. I think a great many of us probably began our spooky short story journey with Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. While Bruce Coville’s anthologies have some lovely illustrations, none are anywhere near the level of high-octane nightmare fuel as those in the original Scary Stories books (big shoutout to Stephen Gammell for drawing shit so frightening I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears). Additionally, Schwartz’s Scary Stories draw heavily from folklore and urban legends and, though the research and influences are referenced, are written primarily by Schwartz for the purpose of the collection. They are, essentially, campfire tales.
In contrast, most of the stories in the Coville books are wholly original. Each book is, as you can see, focused on a specific subject area and features stories–and the occasional poem–from Coville as well as his friends and fellow writers. Typically, the first entry is a lengthier one from Coville himself, either as a standalone story or an excerpt from one of his other works when appropriate. In addition to the titles I mentioned already, the series also contains the Book of Magic and the Book of Spine Tinglers, as well as sequel books to all of them.
(Yes, I bought all those, too, as soon as I realized they existed.)
I could continue to wax poetic about these anthologies, but I’ll let you make your own judgments. They’re a bit difficult to find, especially if you’re looking for digital copies, but you can find most of the individual titles secondhand on ThriftBooks as well as on SecondSale, Alibris, and Amazon (including the original box set here).
If you end up getting one of the four that I hold nearest and dearest to my heart, let me recommend which stories to start with (or to end on, if you’re a Save the Best for Last kind of person).
From Bruce Coville’s Book of Monsters:
● “Duffy’s Jacket” by Bruce Coville is perfectly paced and narrated in a POV my brother and I lovingly refer to as “First Person Sarcastic.” The ending still makes me smile.
● “Uncle Joshua and the Grooglemen” by Debra Doyle and James D. Macdonald feels like it’s being told to you from across the fire by the person who experienced it, and while younger readers may not fully grasp what’s going on, the subtlety of the story being told is beautiful.
From Bruce Coville’s Book of Ghosts:
● “Ghost Walk” by Mark A. Garland is short, sweet, and heart-wrenching all at once.
● “For Love of Him” by Vivian Vande Velde is the story that has, no pun intended, genuinely haunted me for 20+ years. I don’t know what it is about this one, but it imprinted on my brain the first time I read it and I haven’t let go of it since.
From Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares:
● “Drawing the Moon” by Jamie Lee Simner is a masterclass in making the somber both appealing to and suitable for children while still being deeply affecting to adults, told in a way that is both whimsical and dark like all the best fairy tales.
● “Death’s Door” by Mark. A Garland is the first story I can recall in my life that made me outright cackle at the end, even more than “Duffy’s Jacket.” It’s not scary, but it feels sort of like a schadenfreude-themed episode of The Twilight Zone.
From Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares II:
● “The Dollhouse” by Ann S. Manheimer is a slow burn of a story–as much as a short story can be, at any rate–that fills you with a steadily creeping dread and a gut-punch of a payoff.
● “The Gravekeeper” by Patrick Bone is another one that gets pretty dark, but it doesn’t linger on the horrific past of the villain and instead gives the reader a great shot of terror and suspense with a nice, satisfying ending.
● “Gone to Pieces” by Michael Stearns is a wonderfully wacky metaphor for inner turmoil, but it’s the simplicity of it that sneaks in and hits you right in the feels.
Happy reading!
Kayla Martin-Gant (she/her) is a queer, disabled librarian and lover of all things spooky. She wrote her first story, called “The Haunted Dollhouse,” when she was seven years old and received rave reviews from the playground crew. You can find her yelling about various and sundry things on Twitter and BlueSky @poultryofperil
