ohbloodyhell8

What a wonderful time of year to introduce your sons to Poe.  Tonight my sons and I enjoyed reading “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Haunted Palace”, and “The Raven”.  As my sons are only six and eight, we obviously discussed the Red Death paragraph by paragraph, even sentence by sentence, to assist with comprehension.  Still, I knew they’d be interested.  Gothic literature, plague, grand settings, a wonderfully macabre story of elite party guests being trapped and killed by a wicked disease that kills in thirty minutes.  What boy wouldn’t love this story?

I love that my sons are comfortable enough to ask about what they don’t know.  Very William Shatner of them.  They were quite opinionated about the Red Death.  My oldest commented how stupid they were to think that by simply locking themselves away wouldn’t protect them from germs since germs aren’t stopped by a locked door.  With “The Raven”, to be truthful, they got tired of the bird saying “Nevermore”, which reminded me of Bart Simpson’s “eat my shorts”.

“The Haunted Palace” is very sad.  The images of the ghosts floating around, the tattered memories.  The most fun part for me was to get my sons engaged in one of my favorite authors.  The detail in the descriptions and narratives are stunning and create such images for the reader to embrace.  The descriptions of the seven rooms of the apartment in Red Death are exquisite.  To help my sons relate to it, we counted the rooms on our second floor (seven) but imagined each room was as big as our entire second floor.  It helped them to visualize how massive the structure was.  As we read about each room and the colors, we looked around at similar colors in our home.  To capture the picture of the stained glass window, we looked at the small stained glass panel hanging in our living room window and imagined how it would appear with flames shining behind it.

Many people would think that eight and six-year-old boys aren’t ready for Poe, or Hamlet, which they’ve already been introduced to.  The same goes for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  We use different ways to help them connect to it and that includes film.  Particularly for Hamlet, as play are to be seen.  Each story is creepy and connects to our sons.  And, why not?  Life is too short to wait to learn about these awesome stories.

Anyhoo (to quote our eldest’s favorite colloquialism) I must away.  Till tomorrow.  Pleasant dreams of the Red Masque…