Spooky Season's End

Halloween was a success, although we didn't have a huge number of trick or treaters. Our trouble is that there's a stretch of road a block away where absolutely everyone takes the holiday very seriously - like, spider skeleton and 12-foot skeleton seriously - and although the kids talked Beth into buying an animatronic spider that jumps out at you with a hiss when you step on its pad, kids have too much of an appreciation for candy density to have much appetite to walk an entire block to get candy from the only house celebrating spookiness.

Halloween for me always marks the transition between Minnesota's all-too-brief autumn and its bitterly cold winter. We had genuinely nice weather throughout most of October - so nice that it coaxed me into taking up a daily regimen of walking around the neighborhood after dinner, soon after the sun sets. It wasn't too cold last night, but it was accompanied by a drizzly rain that dampened spirits a bit (pun very much used intentionally). Eventually, a nice walk while listening to an audio book will need to give way to sitting on an exercise bike and watching anime; I ain't strolling through ice and snow and bone-numbingly cold wind.

The library recently added a couple dozen new Goosebumps books to its audio book collection, which has pleased Arya. I'm not quite sure why she's so obsessed with horror, but it's been a theme with her so long that we've chewed through dozens of Goosebumps books and a couple of Are You Afraid of the Dark anthologies and had been temporarily reduced to re-listening to old favorites as we struggled to find a really good age-appropriate horror series to consume. That horror, fantasy, and science fiction are close cousins hasn't helped. The Clackity was a fine book, but Arya stopped me halfway into its Stoker-winning sequel (true story: the author is the wife of one of my coworkers), declaring that it just wasn't scary enough.

So, we're back on the R. L. Stine train with its collection of recognizable tropes - an annoying younger sibling (he does annoying little sisters so often that it's slightly offensive), adults who never believe the kids are telling the truth (a cheap trick in children's horror but also a kind of children's horror in itself), a twist in the denouement that turns a happy ending into a bad ending, and some mix of non-gory, gross and scary things usually chosen from a list of about a dozen greatest hits. As much as I'll cherish the memory of those months when Arya would demand I tell her a new scary story every night before bed (and it always had to have four to six things in it that she'd name before I was allowed to invent it), it's way easier to listen to a professional voice actor read a book not made up in the 30 seconds between receiving a creative prompt from an 8-year-old and said 8-year-old getting impatient with how long it's taking Dad to come up with a scary story that includes a village, a dragon, donuts, and a graveyard. It's also way easier to borrow a favorite from the library again than to try to remember how that one story I made up two months ago on that one night when I was so very tired and then tell it just the way I did the first time. "The Hobbit started out as a story Tolkien told to his children"? Mad respect, my dude; that is a tough audience!

Speaking of, Arya's "I'm so tired but I don't want you to leave yet" is to have me recite a version of The Hobbit I've been kind of workshopping with her for several months. Nothing puts her to sleep faster than hearing me say, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit" and the rest. The recent Peter Jackson trilogy was bloated and far inferior to the old animated adaptation (we recently listened to the audio book of The Hobbit, and I cannot tell you the extent to which I've forgotten everything that wasn't in the animated version), but one thing that was absolutely an improvement over the original was making a large part of Bilbo's motive for joining Thorin's company his pity for the fact that these dwarves had no home and that that was the most heart-wrenching thing a Hobbit could imagine befalling anyone. So, that's a key component of the version Arya hears a few times a week. Also, the line "whenever you gather too much gold into one place, it eventually attracts a dragon", which let's be honest, is a none-to-subtle critique of those who hoard any form of wealth.

I'm on a ramble this morning, aren't I? I'm going to wrap this up and try to get more mechanical stuff written for Deep Dive.