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Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆
Date read: October 27 to 31, 2013
Read count: 3

Not as scary as I remember, but still a classic October read.

Over the years, I’ve read, watched, and listened to a number of headless horseman retellings of Irving’s tale, and while I enjoy seeing a dated text brought to contemporary settings and revised with contemporary language, the scare-factor of the original story is either watered down or gone altogether.

As much as I enjoy rereading this story collection, the experience isn’t as good as when I first read it all those years ago at a time when I knew very little about genre tropes and urban legends and enjoyed the simple experience of being scared of things that went bump in the night

— — — — —

Sleepy Hollow, the new TV series on Fox, is pretty good. I watched the first 5 episodes in just one rainy weekend and they were exactly what I was looking for: a mix bag of modern crime mystery and thriller set against an end-times conspiracy story arc (that will span the season) and just the right amount of urban legend thrown in.

I was inspired to reread Irving’s Sleepy Hollow after watching the show. Even though the two have very little in common–Ichabod Crane and urban legends–it’s interesting to offset one against the other while comparing and contrasting tones and tropes.








