As X-E's 2009 Halloween Countdown creeps closer, I'd like to solicit your spooky story ideas. (I've been doing Halloween Countdowns since 2003. I don't have any ideas of my own left.) E-mail me if you've got some thoughts on what kind of heinous Halloween thingies you'd like to see me cover this year. (And of course, if you're sitting on a goldmine of old taped-off-television Halloween cartoons/specials/commercials, I will gladly take the cassette from you and send nothing in return.)

Now, in my effort to knock months-old content off the blog's main page, here's another Halloween quickie:

I couldn't tell you how I came to be in the possession of Monsters: A Pop-Up Book, but I've been trying to work it into the Halloween Countdown for at least four years now. The problem? The entire book is six pages long and has a total of eight words in it. I'm not going to score the site's spooky opus out of this thing, but it seems fine for a pre-season Sunday night.

There is no introductory page of any sort; it just hops right into the action. In fact, the page on the left isn't even a page, technically -- it's the inside cover! This is a very mysterious book of indiscernible and likely frightening origin, but on the bright side, the pop-up monsters are pretty rad.

On the left, we have Mr. Mummy. He doesn't seem too extraordinary at first, but look closer. For one thing, the top half of Mr. Mummy's sarcophagus isn't made of stone, but rather an actual, breathing Egyptian!

And what's that little blue jar near his feet? Mere decoration? No sir! It's clearly a spin on a canopic jar! That's what those crazy Egyptians used to preserve the random organs of their dead! A big, beautiful bottle of guts!

I apologize for the many exclamation points in the preceding paragraph, but it's pretty incredible that a book titled Monsters: A Pop-Up Book could capture such a small-but-critical detail. (More likely, the jar is pointless and was only added to let the artist avoid incorporating troublesome mummy feet into this untested phenomenon colloquially known as pop-upism. But it's fun to pretend, especially around Labor Day.)

On the second page, we have a nice little scene featuring "THE CYCLOPS." The other monsters in this book (Mummy, Vampire, Zombie and so on) do not receive a "the" before their names. They're monsters of a generic sort, but this is the one and only true Cyclops. The definitive Cyclops. The lumbering giant is seen menacing what's either a pair of Greek or a pair of Romans, but those guys seem more concerned with Mr. Mummy's page than with the one-eyed monster behind them. Perhaps they too are in awe of the canopic jar?

Page 3 stars Frankenstein's Monster, played by James Woods. I'm no expert on Frankenstein's Monster lore, but was there ever a case where he looked like some random skinny guy in camo war paint? Have I been I sullied by the Hollywood bastardization of the character's truly intended appearance?

Disregarding Skinny Frank for a second, the scene does have a few cool touches. Dr. Frankenstein is a fun inclusion, and the whole lab setup is brilliant, with all kinds of nonchalant and disconnected gadgets and liquids lazing about like they would in any half-assed haunted house attraction.

On the next page, we have "Zombie." (Not to be confused with "THE Zombie," who would probably look much more authoritative than whatever kind of zombie this is.)

I appreciate the artist's interpretation of a zombie. He's like no other zombie I've ever seen. And he's wearing some kind of hairnet.

The graveyard scene is expected, if a little strange: You wouldn't normally find urns placed on top of tombstones, would you? If you did, there'd probably be an interesting story behind it, but you'd forget to ask about it, because you'd be too busy asking why this particular tombstone is four feet tall. Here lies George, the king of excess. George had one of those enormous clocks in his living room, I bet. You know the kind. Enormous clocks are obnoxious.

Ah, the last two pages of the book, so soon? On the left, "Vampire" stalks his prey in a very Nosferatu way. I'm surprised that they didn't give the victim some form of pajama top, but I'm not complaining: This whole scene is mad hot.

The "Werewolf" page isn't really the kind of showstopper that you'd expect to be saved for the final spread, but it does pack the most action. The werewolf is so driven to eat this guy, he doesn't even care that he broke each and every toe on his right foot to make it happen. Or, possibly, the artist's passion for Monsters: A Pop-Up Book was completely spent by the time he was drawing the last page.

According to the back cover, Monsters: A Pop-Up Book was published in 1987, and was actually just one in a series of pop-up books with equally subversive titles, such as Dinosaurs: A Pop-Up Book and Unicorns: A Pop-Up Book. It totally has the flavor of the nonsense you'd have picked up from an old grade school book fair, and anything that summons memories of Halloween and book fairs is obviously made of magic.