Matt Steinmetz is the Patron Training and Technology Coordinator for the Lexington County Public Library System. He recommends a collection of scary stories for Halloween.

As the child of professors, I grew up surrounded by books.

My bedroom served as the overflow library for books that couldn’t find a home elsewhere.

I had at my fingertips everything from The Canterbury Tales to A Child’s Garden of Verses.

Some of these books I would read to myself long after my parents had put me to bed.

The Chronicles of Narnia and The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood made for excellent nighttime reading.

One of the books on those shelves that did not lend itself to bedtime reading was 50 Great Ghost Stories.

It was a big, heavy book full of tales that kept me awake well past “lights out.”

I mention this because I want to give you, the reader, some explanation about why I enjoy scary stories.

They are nostalgic for me and take me back to a time when it was okay to be scared by a book.

While I was reading those stories I could still hear my parents downstairs talking or laughing as they cleaned up after dinner, and I knew that everything was going to be all right.

Perhaps the best place to start reviewing this collection is with the 3rd story. It’s from the same-titled book by Stephen King.

“If It Bleeds” tells the tale of Holly Gibney, a private detective, who notices that something is “off” about a television reporter who is covering a major disaster.

Gibney suspects that the reporter is somehow connected with the disaster and begins to investigate him despite trying to ignore her suspicions.

After contacting a long retired police sketch artist with a knack for remembering faces, it becomes apparent that the reporter has been covering other major disasters since at least 1960.

While there may be differences in his outward appearance, Gibney knows that the young correspondent is the same person who has excitedly, almost gleefully, been reporting about human tragedy for 60 years.

The phrase “If it bleeds, it leads” is an aphorism in the news business.

It means that tragic stories become lead articles in newspapers and on TV to hook readers and viewers.

In this short story, King takes a critical look at reporting and whether it is news media that feeds off of human tragedy or we as consumers.

Both the story and book as a whole don’t rely on gore to scare you.

They fall more into the realm of the supernatural.

Themes of journalism and writing play roles elsewhere in this collection. I will leave it to the reader to discover them on their own. The book as a whole in

The book as a whole includes adult themes and content and the short story “If It Bleeds” contains spoilers about previous King books yet is still approachable by unfamiliar readers.

I recommend this book to you who are looking for scary stories that can be finished in one sitting with a note of caution:

Having parents around to tell you that everything will be all right afterwards might be beneficial.