The Legend of Sleep Hollow by Washington Irving – Available here

I read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow back in high school. It was Halloween and as all teachers strive to tie literature to something relevant in their students’ lives, mine did the same. I didn’t remember it. I remember being lightly disappointed, being bored, and feeling slightly misled from the cartoon version I was fed as a child.

Alas; time has tempered me. Now I can take it on its own, appreciate that there is something hidden in the language, a deliberate slowness and meticulousness of language that (perhaps this is simply a projection of my expectations, but I can hardly be a judge) exemplifies how language can be used to put us out of ease. The not-quite-rightness of the world subtly hidden in description is something I feel has been lost in much contemporary horror.

It’s not the horror in a visceral, physical sense. It’s different, deeper, the thrill of the wrongness building and escalating until that final wretched moment when the world is turned aside and the humdrum is supplanted by something that scorches our sense of equilibrium and leaves us with a true, layered ‘horror’.

Having Ichabod Crane get brained with a pumpkin was a simply wonderful touch.
It won’t change your life, but it’s a fun, lavishly written little ghost story.

“All these, however, were mere terrors of the night, phantoms of the mind that walk in darkness; and though he had seen many spectres in his time, and been more than once beset by Satan in divers shapes, in his lonely pre-ambulations, yet daylight put an end to all these evils; and he would have passed a pleasent life of it, in despite of the devil and all his works, if his path had not been crossed by a being that causes more perplexity to mortal man than ghosts, goblins, and the whole race of witches put together, and that was – a woman.” – Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow