Tales of the Gross and Gruesome by Ellen Steiber (1995)

Cover art by Broeck Steadman

THE COVER

I'm virtually illiterate when it comes to art, so my first thought on seeing this cover is, "Is that a photograph?!" Nope, pretty sure it's an oil painting. Nothing like a painted cover to immediately age a children's book and give it that sweet, sweet retro musk.

I think we can all agree that there's a lot going on here. Quite a few creepy crawlies, for one thing. Was somebody watching TV while wearing a Silver Shamrock mask? I do enjoy how the antennae on the television set seem to be sprouting from the beetle. (The beetle has bunny ears!) I am, however, somewhat upset that none of those Gummi Worm-colored snakes appear to have heads. Someone call the police.

The couch is oozing some Nickelodeon slime, but, honestly, that was probably there before these kids got their house all haunted. Speaking of those kids, their fashion game is on fire. More casual denim, please. Christmas sweater? It's probably the middle of July, but you go, girl. Her brother obviously never met a color he didn't like. It's easy to appreciate those kinds of things when you have a sensible bowl cut keeping your eyes uncovered to the majesty of the world. 

I don't know, that roach-mantis seems alright. Right? He looks like he's in the middle of telling a hilarious joke, but Christmas Suzy is just not on his wavelength. Been there. 

Bet you never knew that van Gogh was a Lizard Person, did you? He never regrew the ear because it would have blown his cover. WAKE UP PEOPLE. #monsteragoghgogh

Lastly, we have a rocking, shadowy reaper sadly obscured by the boogery text of the title. Even though he's somewhat hidden, that combo of hooded skull, hulking shoulders, glowing eye, and nasty scythe had a big impact on me when I first read this one around 4th or 5th grade. (It also reminded me of another nightmare touchstone of mine--the demon warrior from DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY). I used the image as the visual inspiration for a ghost story I wrote at the time called "The Caretaker". New kid accepts a dare to spend a night at the local cemetery, friends spook him with fake scare before real ghost shows up and goes all Dr. Shreck on their fannies. 

This cover comes to us courtesy of Broeck Steadman, a tireless professional who also crafted graphics under the name E. T. Steadman. Steadman was a fount of gorgeous covers during the 90s, including work for such series as Ghosts of Fear Street, Deadtime Stories, Spooksville, and Are You Afraid of the Dark? Not to mention a few Point Horrors and notorious adult thrillers, as well. His website can still be seen HERE. I highly recommend thumbing through those web pages to get a mad cranial rush of nasty nostalgia. And hey, look at that. His artwork for Tales of the Gross and Gruesome (with reaper eyes restored!) graces the welcome page! 

And apparently the painting was also used in a calendar and jigsaw puzzle. In the words of one of the great philosophers of our generation:

THE STORIES

"The Itch"

After the AC breaks, Michael is just itching to sleep outside instead. It's a hot, muggy evening, but the night passes by without incident. Cut to the next morning, and Michael has a little red bump on his cheek. As the day goes on, Michael finds the itch getting worse and worse, and nothing--not calamine lotion, not the big tennis tournament, not even a straitjacket ordered by his new psychiatrist--can soothe the preteen or keep him from exposing the crawling horror buried beneath his skin.

"Shelter"

Vacationing in rural England can be bad. Getting ditched by the tour bus you were on can be worse. Getting ditched by a tour bus named "Trent's Teen Tours" is maybe a blessing in disguise. All three of these things happen to our "sort of psychic" hero, Holly Rudner. Fortunately, she's able to find shelter from the incoming thunderstorm with a local lad, Alec. Unfortunately, the place they find is a centuries-old longhouse replete with odd noises, vanishing dogs, and the sprit of a nasty blighter who was hung for being a bad neighbor that didn't take kindly to trespassers. 

"The Ghastly Coachman"

Addie Tanner just wants to go straight to some fun and sun at the beach, not hang around her Great-Aunt Emmeline's Southern plantation! As it turns out, the house is quite beautiful, and Emmeline makes a mean fritter, but there are worse things waiting for Addie and her oversized T-shirt come nightfall. Namely the horrible vision of a moon-eyed coachman who beckons Addie to hop aboard his old fashioned hearse and buggy. A nightmare, Addie reasons. But she begins to think differently the next day when a death-defying attraction on the boardwalk amusement park reveals a familiar face... 

One of Steiber's contributions to the Zodiac Chillers YA series. 

"Abracadaver"

Nathan and his Uncle Chris are scaling the precipitous and legendary rock-climbing route known as Abracadaver. While they camp, Uncle Chris reveals the local spook story, a tragic account of a climber named Rich Morgan who was injured during a climb, only to then vanish without a trace, leaving nothing behind but a lot of blood. Legend says his spirit still wanders the rock, waiting for another doomed soul to join him. The story becomes all-too-real when Nathan suffers a fall, forcing Chris to leave for help. And the coming storm brings with it the sounds of someone looking for company.

"The Witch Cat"

The time: 1848. The place: a small town in North Carolina. Amanda and her father have just moved from bustling Boston to this underwhelming burg, yet for all her grousing Amanda can't shake the feeling that something terrible is headed their way. She reveals all of this via letters in the post to her best friend, Sally. It is in these notes that she details the mysterious arrival of Caitlin O'Mara on their farm, a bewitching beauty who seems to exert a negative energy on Amanda. And it only gets worse when the nightmares of the glowing-eyed cat and livestock killings begin...

"Planet Gross"

Tori has had it up to HERE with her lame little brother's obsession with his disgusting video games, but what's a girl with an interest in witchcraft supposed to do in a house full of tech nerds? Ben gets the drop on big sis when he catches her reading her grimoires again, so he forces her into arcade servitude as his Player 2. When Ben manages to transfer the gory graphics from his game onto her computer (AND reads her diary on the hard drive), Tori decides that it's time for some black magic payback.

Steiber's adult fantasy appeared in the Fairy Tale Anthologies edited by Datlow and Windling

"The Woman in White"

An innocent conjuring game at a slumber party turns deadly serious when Claudia is dared by her sister to call the name of La Llorona into the darkened mirror. After 47 recitations, the grimacing spirit appears only to Claudia, growling that she is now due payment of one child in lieu of her own drowned offspring from the folktale. Compelled by an awful premonition, Claudia descends into an arroyo during the rainy season for a final confrontation with the Weeping Woman that will leave her marked for life.

"Killer Bees"

Making friends is hard, but making friends with boorish sadist Eric Thompson is even harder. Especially if you're Jeremy Hughes, budding entomologist and the target of Eric's disdain every time their mothers buddy them up. Eric's unmasked boredom at Jeremy's fun facts concerning the migration of Africanized honeybees is bad enough, but Eric tips the scales when he slaughters one of Jeremy's prized pets. Turns out that Eric should have been paying closer attention to Jeremy's lectures. 

THE REVIEW

Hey guy, don’t let that title throw you off too badly. Yes, author Ellen Steiber’s stories offer up the bloody bits (all of which are appropriately icky), but underneath that finely-spread coating of grue there is much quaint, evocative, and effective writing to be had in a volume promising Tales of the Gross and Gruesome (Random House Books for Young Readers, 1995).

Steiber, who has such 90s-tastic writing credits as entries in the book series for TV stalwarts like FULL HOUSE and THE X-FILES, works the genre’s trappings with surprising ease, crafting palpable atmospheres of dread and foreboding. The collection is a mix of original fiction and folkloric retellings, a common trait seen in books of scary stories written for children at the time. 

On the chestnut side, we have the likes of spiders-in-the-face ("The Itch"), were-kitties ("The Witch Cat"), titular women in white, and the old "room for one more" joke ("The Ghastly Coachman"). If you perused any number of tomes dedicated to spooky legends, you surely came across one or all of these fabled figures at some point. To her credit, Steiber does an admirable job of spicing up most of these with her own personal touch. Even "The Witch Cat", the most straightforward retelling in the book, comes perfumed with a sense of wistful doom that helps characterize a faceless oral narrative and give it the emotional heft it needs:

But something about those willow trees makes me uneasy. As though there were some real grief around that pond--as though something bad happened there a long time ago, and the land is still hurting over it.

This is a surprising throughline that comes up in other stories: the physiological scars that register a psychological effect on the characters. They are given to musings about the wilderness and the universe, realizing even as they grow up that they still only occupy a small and fragile place within them. Claudia from "The Woman in White" puts it perhaps the most poignantly: 

"I feel like the desert is always waiting for me to make a mistake. Just one mistake--I don't carry enough water or I miss the trail or I step too close to a rattler. That's all it takes. It's just waiting to get me and you and anyone else who makes a mistake."

Or take this sunny observation from Nathan as he dangles from "Abracadaver":

He looked at the wall of crumbling granite in front of him. His life had come down to one very simple choice: Climb or fall.

I mean, fuck. Not what you would expect from a collection boasting a ripoff Goosebumps tagline, but here we are. (That's marketing for you.) One thing that Steiber makes clear here and elsewhere in the book is that her kids are not safe. Common knowledge if you had a more refined palate when it came to children's literature back in the day, but for a modest ghoul like myself who was weaned on the likes of ol' Robert Lawrence, this kind of thing is a game-changer. I say "is" because all of this went completely over my head when I first read Steiber's collection in grade school. Only now do her pain-haunted words land with me. 

Because there is pain here. Plenty of it. Steiber does a wonderful job of making it real for us, like a burdensome weight whose pressure we can feel on both our bodies and our minds. Check out these two keen observations from "The Itch" and "Abracadaver":

All he could think about was the itch and scratching, or not scratching, it. Everything else in his world seemed to have disappeared. The itch was the only thing that mattered. It was the only thing there was.

...

Like the clouds above him, the pain kept building--getting denser, stronger, blocking out everything else. It wouldn't let him rest. The pain was going to burn him up, break him, eat him alive. It was going to drive him out of his mind.

And we haven't even talked about the cruelty yet! This is best epitomized in "Killer Bees," the story that caps the collection. It's a rather slight conte cruel for children, but it shows an eagerness to bring on the hurt. We're talking EC Comics-level sadism, with the bully villain presenting to the hero the dissected body of his missing pet tarantula in tupperware as his dinner. The bully is also given to literally pulling wings off of flies. Naturally. "The wingless, legless fly was still sitting on the windowsill, its helpless body just waiting for death." 

I'd say you couldn't write this stuff, but apparently you can.

The only reprieve we have from all this trauma is "Planet Gross", a little popcorn yarn that's much more on the Stine wavelength. Steiber gleefully depicts some 16-bit violence from the titular scifi monster mashup/shoot-em-up. Earlier laundry list descriptions of computer hardware give the impression that Steiber was not a consummate gamer herself, but she fakes it until she makes it with aplomb:

This time, Dr. Viola May peered into a hole on the surface of the planet. Seconds later, green batlike creatures rose out of the hole and attached themselves to her body. The video zoomed in to a close-up on the bat things. They made loud sucking sounds as they munched on the scientist's flesh. Next came a close-up of Dr. May--her face frozen in a mask of terror as green slime oozed out of her eyes, ears, and nose. A bat-thing swooped down to suck the green gunk up.

Yeah, it’s pretty sweet.

It's too bad Steiber didn't get the chance to make a respectable Gross and Gruesome series, as this slim little number proves that she had the stuff of a true blue hackle-raiser. It was great revisiting this one and picking up on all the existential dread I missed years ago. Fans of horrific juvenilia may be remiss that Steiber wasn't more prolific in the genre, but those willing to make the climb up this cadaverous collection will be thankful for the experience.

Steiber's novelization of an X-FILES episode.

THE QUOTES

Dr. Harding frowned at Michael and shook his head. "Nope, doesn't look like allergies, either. I don't know what your problem is."

("The Itch")

"I saw an old ruined farmhouse about a mile and a half back. It definitely looked deserted. We can spend the night there..." 

("Shelter")

A huge ancient oak tree stood in front of the house, skeletal in the dying light.

("Shelter")

She shut her eyes as she felt a cold nose press against her palm.

("Shelter")

"Rich begins to shiver and talk nonsense--like his mind is gone or something deep inside him is broken."

("Abracadaver")

"If you dehydrate, it will only make you weaker. And don't be scared. I'll be back ASAP."

("Abracadaver")

His thin, cadaverous body was badly twisted. One leg had been splinted, and blood ran from his mouth. Bones jutted through his rotting flesh. But he turned his head toward Nathan and stretched out a pleading, blood-soaked hand.

("Abracadaver")

Papa says Miles is a "sweet little town." I don't know about sweet, but it is [sic] sure is little. It's not even on the map! I think they call it Miles because it's miles from everything else on earth."

("The Witch Cat")

She was tired of video games, CD-ROM players, modems, nets, and everything else related to computers. She wouldn't care if she never saw another computer again. Unfortunately, the chances of that weren't too likely, since she lived in the House of Nerds.

("Planet Gross")

"You're a wimp," Ben said.

"And you're a squeeb," Tori said.

("Planet Gross")

"Oh, gross! Supersick! Eeeww--he's spewing vomit! Ugh! I can't believe he's hurling, and it looks so real--he must have eaten a pizza!"

("Planet Gross")

"Let's have a séance!" said a red-haired girl named Nicole.

("The Woman in White")

He and Eric had been thrown together all their lives, and they'd never gotten along. Not even for a day. That was because Eric was a bully and a moron.

("Killer Bees")

The movie finally ended with everyone in Mexico, except two brave English-speaking scientists, getting wiped out by killer bees.

("Killer Bees")

 

The author herownself