Last October (2017), I made it a goal to drink 31 different beers—a new one each day—by the end of the month. Incredibly, I was successful in my attempt, which I dubbed #31FallBeers (look it up on any form of social media!) This year, I wanted to try something similar, but there were two important changes I needed to make. Firstly, I wanted to be able to expound more, so I decided against social media blurbs in favor of long-form posts on my site. Second: it needed to be much, much cheaper than drinking 31 different beers. The result? #31DaysOfJunk. Strap in and hold on tight, and please enjoy this month-long odyssey into the sugary, fatty belly of the autumnal beast.
Full disclosure: I don’t like Cadbury Creme Eggs. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten one, so maybe it’s unfair of me to say I don’t like them. As a kid, I genuinely thought it was a chocolate covered egg yolk/albumen, and that thought sickened me. So, naturally, I avoided them.
Here’s a funny story: In fifth grade, our teacher sprang an unexpected assignment on the class. “The first three people to turn in their papers,” he declared, “will get a surprise.” Of course, I just had to have that surprise, and being the little overachiever I was (a trait which waved bye-bye to me long ago), I actually finished first. I trotted up to my teacher’s desk, paper in hand, and eagerly awaited my surprise. He examined my work, gave an approving grunt, and then as if he’d suddenly remembered what he’d promised, frazzedly began rifling through his desk drawers, in search of the surprise he’d clearly fabricated in order to get the class to finish the assignment.
“Ah, here you go,” he said. From the top drawer of his desk, he produced an out-of-season Cadbury Creme Egg; dinged, dented, and flakes of foil peeled back and missing. This was my surprise. He handed me the egg (which, at the time, I think I still believed was a real egg), and sent me back to my desk. Talk about feeling scammed!
This is all to say that I really don’t have much to compare Cadbury’s spooky “Screme Egg” to. From the outside, it looks like a regular old Cadbury Creme Egg, the recognizable star shape stamped into the side of the chocolate shell. The inside of the Screme, however, is much cooler than a regular Creme: instead of yellow and white innards (barf), we get green and white innards! (Cool!)
The whiteness of the goo is a tad pearlescent, which is sort of pretty for a candy. When it got melty and mixed with the slime green, it created this minty color which looked like toothpaste. (Same consistency, too.) As for its flavor: straight-forward sugary vanilla, how I imagine it would taste eating a Yankee Candle.
All in all, a simple yet fun twist on the Easter treat.
Last October (2017), I made it a goal to drink 31 different beers—a new one each day—by the end of the month. Incredibly, I was successful in my attempt, which I dubbed #31FallBeers (look it up on any form of social media!) This year, I wanted to try something similar, but there were two important changes I needed to make. Firstly, I wanted to be able to expound more, so I decided against social media blurbs in favor of long-form posts on my site. Second: it needed to be much, much cheaper than drinking 31 different beers. The result? #31DaysOfJunk. Strap in and hold on tight, and please enjoy this month-long odyssey into the sugary, fatty belly of the autumnal beast.
Last September, Blumhouse’s Ryan Turek and Bearded Lady’s Mystic Museum, an oddity shop in Burbank, CA, teamed up to bring Slashback Video—an ode to the mom & pop video shop of yore, specifically their worshipped horror aisles—to screaming, vivid life. It was a massive success, and I was lucky enough to be there opening night. Let me assure you, the second I stepped through the threshold, I was suddenly 8-years-old again—zapped back to the small Midwestern video shops I’d frequent with my parents, and the horror aisles I’d spend the whole time exploring.
Like every great horror film from the ’80s, Slashback needed a sequel, and it got one this year, once again in September. This time, the exhibit had expanded to include laser discs and video games, enhancing its perma-nostalgia vibe.
Quirkily enough, they also released a soda! As I’d been planning to do #31DaysOfJunk for the last few months, I immediately jumped at the chance to include a sugary soft drink based around this museum show I’d enjoyed so much.
The neon yellow color of the soda made me think it would taste like Mountain Dew, obviously. And while the first sniff of the drink had “generic citrus soda” written all over, the taste is something totally different. I’d go as far as to say, “impossible to pinpoint”. Honeydew? That can’t be right, can it? Or like cream soda from another planet. Ultimately, I decided it mostly tasted like one of these popsicles. Remember those? It tastes exactly like how I remember those popsicles tasting.
Super sweet, low carbonation, and to be honest, my tongue is kinda numb after drinking it. Basically, the perfect drink for a Friday night in October of ’89, while laying on your stomach on the living room floor in front of the TV, seeing Halloween II for the first time, edited for content, commercials and all.
Last October (2017), I made it a goal to drink 31 different beers—a new one each day—by the end of the month. Incredibly, I was successful in my attempt, which I dubbed #31FallBeers (look it up on any form of social media!) This year, I wanted to try something similar, but there were two important changes I needed to make. Firstly, I wanted to be able to expound more, so I decided against social media blurbs in favor of long-form posts on my site. Second: it needed to be much, much cheaper than drinking 31 different beers. The result? #31DaysOfJunk. Strap in and hold on tight, and please enjoy this month-long odyssey into the sugary, fatty belly of the autumnal beast.
Holy shit! I could smell these suckers the second I opened the box. I’m talking smell them through their sealed cellophane from a good three feet away. I like when a food can do that: signal to me that it’s nearby.
This is junk food in its purest form. It’s cakey, it’s slathered in dense frosting, it has a creme center. It’s pure sugar and fat. It has absolutely no nutritional value. This is what you eat when you wanna do some real damage.
Smells like: super syrupy French toast with bananas. Tastes like: super syrupy French toast with bananas, oddly enough.
These are quite good and dangerously easy to eat. The cake itself is airy, and the whole thing has a bunch of different flavors melding in your mouth with each bite: apple, cinnamon, banana, syrup, vanilla. And there’s something strangely pleasant about the consistency of the frosting, which is stiff and grainy, like a layer of hardened candle wax. Plus, the vibrant blood-red swirl on top is a nice touch—good visual stimulation.
Last October (2017), I made it a goal to drink 31 different beers—a new one each day—by the end of the month. Incredibly, I was successful in my attempt, which I dubbed #31FallBeers (look it up on any form of social media!) This year, I wanted to try something similar, but there were two important changes I needed to make. Firstly, I wanted to be able to expound more, so I decided against social media blurbs in favor of long-form posts on my site. Second: it needed to be much, much cheaper than drinking 31 different beers. The result? #31DaysOfJunk. Strap in and hold on tight, and please enjoy this month-long odyssey into the sugary, fatty belly of the autumnal beast.
Sometimes you don’t even have to change the recipe, all you gotta do is change the color, or, in the case of Reese’s Puffs Peanut Butter Bats, change the shape.
Now, if you’ve ever eaten a bowl of Reese’s Puffs, you know what to expect. It’s one of those mouth-destroying cereals that belong in same the category as Cap’n Crunch; one bowl, and the roof of your mouth is shredded—raw and tender to the touch of your tongue. There’s also a weird, oily film which coats the cereal pieces (and in turn, the inside of your mouth). Still, even with all the oral destruction, it’s easy to put away three bowls in one sitting.
The Reese’s Puffs Peanut Butter Bats are no different. Well, they are, shape-wise. But the flavor (even the weird, oily sheen) is still the same.
Still, there’s something to be said about the way the flattened pieces somehow do less damage to the inside of one’s mouth than the standard cubelet-shaped pieces. A true miracle in cereal engineering, the flat bats just crunch easier. A more comfortable chew. It got me to wondering: is there the same amount of “material” in a bat-shaped Reese’s Puff as the cubelet-shaped Reese’s Puff? Does one have more mass than the other? Can that explain why the bat shapes are more mouth-friendly?
Too much science for me. All I know is: these taste the same as the Puffs, but your mouth won’t be hurting by bowl three.
Last October (2017), I made it a goal to drink 31 different beers—a new one each day—by the end of the month. Incredibly, I was successful in my attempt, which I dubbed #31FallBeers (look it up on any form of social media!) This year, I wanted to try something similar, but there were two important changes I needed to make. Firstly, I wanted to be able to expound more, so I decided against social media blurbs in favor of long-form posts on my site. Second: it needed to be much, much cheaper than drinking 31 different beers. The result? #31DaysOfJunk. Strap in and hold on tight, and please enjoy this month-long odyssey into the sugary, fatty belly of the autumnal beast.
I bought this solely for the packaging. Kinda hard to pass up a metallic black bag covered in a web pattern and fun, colorful fonts. It’s not even especially well designed, but it is, for whatever reason, incredibly nice to look at. I can’t explain why things like this work sometimes; it’s art, man.
First smell out of the bag was pure chemical. Almost like a cleaning agent, or hand soap. I assure you, this did not dissuade me from eating it.
While I wouldn’t exactly call it sour, it does have a nice tang when it first hits the tongue. Then a quick flash of a muted apple flavor, like the last sip from a glass of apple juice after all the ice cubes have melted. And then all of that gives way to pure sugary sweetness. Kinda crazy that’s all cotton candy is: flavored sugar. But hey, it’s been working for 120 years.
The dense little pillow form it came in is fun to pull apart into wispy chunks. Yes, the spider web comparison is an obvious first choice, but I bet they could go with something ghost-related if they wanted to switch things up next year.
Fun science fact: I walked away from my plate of cotton candy remnants for a few hours, and when I returned its texture had completely transformed—from soft and malleable to crisp and brittle. I tried picking some up, and it fell apart in my fingers, almost like the way a sand castle falls apart.
When I was in elementary school, I was introduced to a series of books that would become stalwarts of my bookshelf to this very day.
It was at one of those pop-up Scholastic Book Fairs (in our empty gymnasium, which doubled as a lunchroom and occasional Starlab set-up) where I first discovered Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories trilogy–Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3…More Tales to Chill Your Bones.
I don’t recall them being recommended to me; I don’t remember having seen them before that day. All I know is: I was a kid who loved anything remotely spooky, and when I saw the cover of the boxed set–that of a wide-eyed disembodied head–I knew I had to have them. (Plus, it couldn’t have been that expensive; my parents allotted me only so much money for the book fair.)
I’ve revisited the stories many times over the years. Some have held their heart-racing, fireside charm; others have lost their luster as I’ve gotten older and more desensitized. And some I’ve come to appreciate more as an adult than I did as a kid. It’s crazy to think that I was able to buy them from school at such a young age, considering Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was, at the time, a banned book–number one, in fact, on the American Library Association’s list of most challanged books from 1990-1999.
Since today is National Read a Book Day, I thought I’d make a list of my 10 favorite stories from the entire Scary Stories set. While the stories in the books range from terrifying to just plain silly, I wanted to focus on the ones that creeped the hell out of me.
“The Thing”, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Growing up in the Midwest, one of the things that creeped me out most about many of the stories in these books were their Anywhere, USA type settings. As the stories are essentially folklore and urban legends, the imagery used to describe the locations is steeped in timeless Americana: sprawling fields, empty parking lots, lonely post offices. Reading about two brothers who spot a dead man crawling out of a field across the street, when I myself grew up on a street surrounded by fields? That’s downright terrifying.
“The White Satin Evening Gown”, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
This is a classic urban legend. A girl buys a second-hand dress to wear to her prom, becomes dizzy at some point in the night, goes home, and is found dead the next day. The cause? Embalming fluid on the dress seeped into her skin and killed her; turns out the dress she bought was stolen off a buried corpse and sold to the shop she purchased it from. There’s just something so sad about it happening to an innocent, destitute young girl just trying to enjoy one night of her hard life. Her last words are: “I think I have danced too much”. Yeesh.
“Something Was Wrong”, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
This is the first story from the second book, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which feels much darker than the first book. In fact, I think a bulk of the most unsettling tales comes from this volume. This particular story, about an amnesiac man wandering the streets asking for help–only to scare off everyone he encounters–is another familiar tale, even popping up in the Tales from the Crypt comic book (and later, its 1972 film incarnation, as Reflection of Death). The simplistic story–combined with Stephen Gammell’s etheral illustration–is truly haunting. It’s just a hell of an opener to an increasingly grim book.
“The Bride”, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Not much happens in this one. In fact, it’s only about five paragraphs long. There’s no twist, no moral, no comeuppance. Just a wedding night game of hide-and-seek gone wrong. A bride gets trapped in a trunk and her skeleton is found decades later. That’s it. I’m telling you man: these stories are dark.
“The Drum”, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Okay, this one gets my vote for most upsetting story from the entire series. Two young sisters live in the country with their mom and baby brother. One day they come across a little girl in a field, playing a toy drum. The sisters want the drum, and the little girl promises to give it to them if they go home and act bad. The sisters do as they’re told, and return to the little girl, who tells them “Oh no, you must be much worse than that.” This continues for a few days, each time the mother getting more upset, and each time the strange little girl telling the sisters to act worse than the last time. Finally, the mother warns the sisters, “If you continue to act badly, I will leave and take your brother away, and you will get a new mother–one with glass eyes and a wooden tail.” The sisters are understandly freaked, yet they act bad one last time and go visit the girl in the field, who reveals she never intended to give them the drum in the first place; “we were playing a game, I thought you knew.” The sisters return home, only to find their mother and baby brother missing. But someone with glass eyes and a thumping wooden tail is waiting for them.
“The Window”, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
A girl notices a creature staring at her through her bedroom window; it breaks in and attacks her, bites her on the neck. It runs away but returns a few months later, only this time the girl’s brothers chase it to a nearby cemetery where they find it in a mausoleum, sleeping in a coffin. What makes this one so creepy is they refer to the creature as a “vampire”, but they also hint that it might be just some guy who escaped from a local insane asylum. It’s never made clear, as the girl doesn’t seem to suffer any effects from the neck bite. Also: a great way to terrify any child well into adulthood is to somehow make them afraid of their own bedroom. Tell them something lives in the closet, under their bed…or outside their bedroom window. This story is pure creeps.
“The Bed by the Window”, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Speaking of beds by windows, The Bed by the Window is another bleak, unsettling story. Two old bed-ridden men share a room at a hospital; one of them has a window view and describes all the amazing sites to the other. Pretty girls, parades, excitement. Eventually, the other guy wants to see for himself, but he knows he won’t get moved to the window bed until the first guy dies–so he hides his heart medicine, and sure enough, the first guy croaks. The thing is: when the other guy finally gets the new bed, he discovers the window faces a brick wall.
“Wonderful Sausage”, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
This is one of the stories that makes me go, “Oh, yeah, that’s probably why this book was challanged by the ALA”. In it, a butcher gets mad with his wife and ends up killing her, turning her into sausage, and feeding her to his customers. The demand for this delicious new sausage leads to him killing a few locals and animals, and turning them all into sausage, too. The most insane part is where it details how he seasons his wife’s ground up flesh and smokes it in his smokehouse. This, coming from a book labeled “Ages 9 and up”!
“Bess”, Scary Stories 3
This is one of those archetypical folklore stories–the kind that comes full circle, the kind I love so much. A young farmhand has a favorite horse; a docile pet named Bess. One day, he visits a fortune teller who warns him that he will be killed by Bess. Though he doesn’t believe the teller, the young man is still wary of the horse. Eventually, he sells Bess and forgets all about the warning. Sometime later, he runs into the man he sold the horse to, who in turn tells him that Bess got sick awhile back and had to be put down. The farmhand requests to see Bess one last time, as she was his favorite horse. As he strokes what’s left of her head in the back of a barn, a rattlesnake that had made its home in the horse’s skull shoots out and bites the farmhand, killing him and fulfilling the teller’s prophecy. Knowing that Death has a clock for each of us, and that we can’t avoid the bell tolling no matter how hard we try–that’s some heavy stuff right there.
“Harold”, Scary Stories 3
Lastly, perhaps the most memorable character and story from any of the Scary Stories books, is Harold. This scarecrow-come-to-life tale is the stuff of nightmares. Two friends, alone on a farm, decide to stave off boredom by making a life-sized strawman out of canvas and hay. They put him out in the morning to scare off the birds and seat him at the dinner table at night. They also take to beating him when the mood strikes. Eventually, Harold stands up and walks out of their hut, climbs to the roof, and starts “galloping like a horse on its hind legs”. As if that imagery isn’t creepy enough, it gets worse: the two friends finally decide to leave, but soon realize they’ve forgotten some expensive milking stools back at the hut. One of them decides to go back while the other continues on. As the one walking gets to the crest of a hill, he looks back down at the hut and sees Harold on the roof of the hut again, “stretching out a bloody skin to dry in the sun”.
Looking at the picture below–me and my buddy, excitedly reading my newly acquired Scary Stories collection, the one I’d just purchased from the book fair–it’s clear the stories didn’t affect me too badly. I’d say they instilled just the right amount of terror. The kind that lives in the backroom of your brain and invites you to revisit every once in a while.
Camera Viscera 