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Creepy Crawls: A Horror Fiend's Travel Guide
Creepy Crawls is a ghoulish and ghastly terror-touring travel guide to the most dreadfully Horror-ed of destinations! From Tobe Hooper’s 1974 drive-in classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the real-life Baltimore haunts of Edgar Allan Poe to the macabre features of Paris, France, Creepy Crawls offers morbidly offbeat locations for horror aficionados and travel buffs alike. Author Leon Marcelo lurks with you amongst the foulest of frightfully fiendish horror sites, and offers the name and address of each destination, horror trivia and curiosities, photographs, travel tips, all in an entertainingly ghoulish narrative that is in the jugular vein of beloved horror-host Elvira and the classic horror comic book icon The Crypt Keeper .
380 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 9, 2011
I was drawn to this book because it has a large photo of Highgate Cemetery on its cover. It claims to be a travel guide to "Hollywood Gravesites, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe...and Paris, London, and Dario Argento's Rome," among other places. I didn't see how I could go wrong.
Besides, Leon was a contributor to Morbid Curiosity (issue #7, back in 2003) and was kind enough to name-check the magazine on the back cover. I wanted to support him by buying his book.
Unfortunately, it's so overwritten that I found it unreadable: "As we lurched beneath this ingress and down the mausoleum-ranked throat of Egyptian Avenue, it was with no small rise of goosebumps." Under the entrance? Is that really what he meant to say? Perhaps. The paragraph goes on: "When we left such darkness, it was to step out into what is called the 'Circle of Lebanon," its very name testifying yet again to Victorian England's obsession with the Arabesque." That's one way to interpret it. It could also be a Biblical reference, or merely label the Lebanese Cypress growing in the center of the circle. Sometimes, a tree is just a tree.
Also, you would think that for a cemetery like Highgate that had been desecrated by actual vampire hunters, Marcelo might spend more than a sentence on its history.
I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, Andrea Lankford's Haunted Hikes was scarier -- and easier to read.
Besides, Leon was a contributor to Morbid Curiosity (issue #7, back in 2003) and was kind enough to name-check the magazine on the back cover. I wanted to support him by buying his book.
Unfortunately, it's so overwritten that I found it unreadable: "As we lurched beneath this ingress and down the mausoleum-ranked throat of Egyptian Avenue, it was with no small rise of goosebumps." Under the entrance? Is that really what he meant to say? Perhaps. The paragraph goes on: "When we left such darkness, it was to step out into what is called the 'Circle of Lebanon," its very name testifying yet again to Victorian England's obsession with the Arabesque." That's one way to interpret it. It could also be a Biblical reference, or merely label the Lebanese Cypress growing in the center of the circle. Sometimes, a tree is just a tree.
Also, you would think that for a cemetery like Highgate that had been desecrated by actual vampire hunters, Marcelo might spend more than a sentence on its history.
I really wanted to like this book. Unfortunately, Andrea Lankford's Haunted Hikes was scarier -- and easier to read.
March 13, 2020
The concept of this book is what struck me to purchase it when found online. I read no reviews about it prior to my reading.
After finishing, I agree whole heartedly with the other reviewers. While I enjoy the idea of a book about dark history and horror themed travels, the vocabulary and the continuous placement of it in every sentence made it almost impossible to read. It was hard to understand because of the over the top and all too frequent odd word placements. It felt I was more reading some sort of long riddle than a book on strange places.
“..London would be an offensively outraging offering, as if upon guts and gore splattered platter, of madness at its most maniacally manslaughterous- and stalking the fog smother streets of London!”
Am I the only one who feels they have to truly think about that sentence to understand it? That is what every single sentence is like.
Two other things that struck me as a sort of annoyance during this reading.
1. He kept referring to his wife with very odd names such as “black bride” “gruesome twosome” every single time he mentioned her... which is more than too many times.
2. The amount of time and pages spent in London and Paris was just too much for me personally. It was a quarter of the book spent on these places and it was hard to even get the true history of anything.
Overall, this book itself made me want to write something of my own about the history of these dark and horror connected places.
After finishing, I agree whole heartedly with the other reviewers. While I enjoy the idea of a book about dark history and horror themed travels, the vocabulary and the continuous placement of it in every sentence made it almost impossible to read. It was hard to understand because of the over the top and all too frequent odd word placements. It felt I was more reading some sort of long riddle than a book on strange places.
“..London would be an offensively outraging offering, as if upon guts and gore splattered platter, of madness at its most maniacally manslaughterous- and stalking the fog smother streets of London!”
Am I the only one who feels they have to truly think about that sentence to understand it? That is what every single sentence is like.
Two other things that struck me as a sort of annoyance during this reading.
1. He kept referring to his wife with very odd names such as “black bride” “gruesome twosome” every single time he mentioned her... which is more than too many times.
2. The amount of time and pages spent in London and Paris was just too much for me personally. It was a quarter of the book spent on these places and it was hard to even get the true history of anything.
Overall, this book itself made me want to write something of my own about the history of these dark and horror connected places.
March 23, 2025
The amount of alliteration in this book is very distracting. Examples straight from the book, "Having undertaken our external exploratory examination of the Monroeville...","of our communion with that loathsomely legendary location...", "that most ghastly, ghoul glorifying gang of..." and "who has ever been disturbed, dread filled, and drained by...". The author also constantly refers to himself and his wife as "unspeakable bride" and "yours cruelly," it was charming the first couple times, then annoying with all the dozens more times it flooded the pages. This book is "bibbidi bobbidi boo" with emphasis on the boo.
January 29, 2012
Too many puns and alliterations. The over-the-top corniness distracted me from actually being able to read this book.
April 14, 2012
not very good for me I'm afriad.
May 1, 2017
The puns were just a bit much for me. I don't mind adding a bit to the horror aspect of the information, but when I have to search out the information around the puns, that is a bit much. Good news is that I did not send a lot of money on the book. I just wished I had read the reviews before buying and wasting my time.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews