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The Curse of the Parsimonious Great Aunt

Who else misses the days when scary stories for kids could get a little gruesome?  OK, maybe this isn’t strictly for kids, but it reads like it could be.  The story here is that a couple of kids are staying with their Great Aunt and she has a plan to sell any candy they get at Halloween to buy potatoes.  It’s never explained that this woman is raising these children, but that seems likely considering that they stay there for weeks and nobody seems to notice that they’re missing.  These greedy kids wanted to keep the candy and they wanted to steal the candy from all the other kids, so they concocted a plan.  They chopped the head off their Great Aunt and dragged her body along (on a sled) behind them to scare kids into dropping all their candy.  The plan worked perfectly, but the kids didn’t consider the fact that people who are wrongly killed in stories like these rarely stay dead, even if they were jerks in real life and kind of deserved it.  Anyway, it’s a cute and creepy book, and something that I would consider fun for all ages, unless of course the parents in question still somehow think that can shield their kids from all the awfulness of the world.  Good luck with that!  Anyway, the worst the kid has to see here is a removed head, and they probably have those things on the Disney channel at this point.  Check it out, it’s never too early for a good Halloween story.  No price listed, I’ll go with $3 at random.