Book info

• Title The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
• Author Washington Irving
• Year 1820
• Genre Horror

Ichabod Crane, a schoolteacher, came to Tarry Town in the glen of Sleepy Hollow to ply his trade in educating young minds. He was a gullible and excitable fellow, often so terrified by locals' stories of ghosts that he would hurry through the woods on his way home, singing to keep from hysterics. Until late one night, he finds that maybe they're not just stories. What is that dark, menacing figure riding behind him on a horse? And what does it have in its hands? And why wasn't schoolteacher Crane ever seen in Sleepy Hollow again?

Thoughts

Read this very quickly when I realised just how short it is! I’ve seen the film but not for a long while, and I hadn’t anticipated what scant source material it had to work from. No matter how short it is, though, the greatness is packed right in.

The story itself is fantastic, part ghost story, part mystery, part romance. It’s over before it begins, of course, but along the way there are some lovely descriptions and plenty of engaging words (some of which I had to look up in the dictionary). It was playful and delightful and yet creepy where it needed to be. I loved it.

Rating: 5 / 5