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Dispatches from the 60s #4

Yes, more Ellen Raskin! Also a turkey, sort of?

leila roy

leila roy

— 3 min read

Hi, friends,

Super quick one today, but I found this book right before work this morning, and given that one of the spreads is perfect perfect PERFECT for Thanksgiving, I didn’t want to forget to share it.

If you do the Thanksgiving thing, I hope you enjoy. If you don’t, I hope you have a great day regardless.

Regardless of your Thanksgiving Status, I hope that you eat something delicious EVERY SINGLE DAY. Good food should not be an occasional treat, it should be a given.

Back and front cover of the 1969 hardcover edition of Shrieks at Midnight: Macabre Poems, Eerie and Humorous, selected by Sara and John E. Brewton, drawings by Ellen Raskin. While this ALSO works for Thanksgiving, there’s another illustration at the bottom of this post that’s even more hilariously on point.

Shrieks at Midnight: Macabre Poems, Eerie and Humorous is another poetry anthology illustrated by Ellen Raskin. It’s broken up into themed sections—Shiverous Beasts, Grave Humor, A Whiff of Murder, etc—and Raskin’s illustrations appear as two-page spreads at the beginning of each section.

There are lots of different poets featured, from Bret Harte to Langston Hughes to Edward Lear to Dorothy Parker to William Makepeace Thackeray to Lewis Carroll to A. E. Housman. And there are lots and lots and lots that are unattributed—and yes, the Lizzie Borden nursery rhyme is in here.

The poems range in length, from a couplet:

Here lies the body of Cassie O’Lang!
She tried to kill her husband with a boomerang.

to the entirety of Robert Service’s Cremation of Sam McGee, which is a good five pages long. And there are lots of limericks for good measure.

Huge points for this: There are three indexes, one for authors, one for titles, and one for first lines. THAT’S THE KIND OF THING I LIKE TO SEE IN A POETRY ANTHOLOGY, TYVM.

Other than the cover and the title page, Raskin’s illustrations only pop up at the beginning of each section, like this:

Two page spread from Shrieks at Midnight. Intro to the ‘A Whiff of Murder’ section, which features a woman on the left shooting a cannon at a man on the right, who is shooting a pistol. The woman has a bullet hole in her left shoulder and the man has a cannonball-sized hole in his midsection. Also, he’s carrying a knife for good measure.

Because of the style and the giggling violence, they make me think a bit of Edward Gorey’s opening credits to Masterpiece Mystery!, which makes me suspect that I’d have LOVED this book as a kid.

Because boy oh boy did I love the opening credits to Masterpiece Mystery!.

[AHAHAHA I just looked at the Wikipedia Mystery! page to see when the Gorey opening first appeared, and it goes all the way back to 1980 when the show debuted. But Gorey’s original storyboard would have made the opening 10 minutes long, and he wouldn’t cut it down, so PBS had to tag someone else in to finish it, heh.]

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And here it is, Raskin’s turkey-centric horrorshow:

Two-page spread from Shrieks at Midnight. Intro to the ‘Mix You into Stuffin’’ section, with six people at a long table, prepping for a feast that includes a turkey that has a human head?

This pre-dates Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses by over thirty years, but that turkeyman does make me think of poor old Rainn Wilson’s fate in that one. (Different animal, and not nearly as bloody, but if you know you know.)

Anyway, I love how the poor turkeyman’s beard mirrors the contents of the spilling bowl at the other end of the table. (Also, there’s something about the faces of the couple in the middle that makes me think a bit of the animation in The Yellow Submarine. It can’t just be those flared pants, right?)

Uhhh… so, enjoy your turkey if you’re having it this week???

Talk soon,

Leila

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