Skin and Bones – Katie L. Carroll

You may have noticed that I like trying new things when it comes to my author career. My published books alone, with their varied age ranges and genres, would clue you in to this. Which brings you my latest endeavor of the audiobook for Grammy’s Halloween Scare!

Listen to the audiobook on Chirp, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Libro.fm, and Google Play, Spotify and more to come. Also, you can check Libby and Hoopla from your local library and request it if they don’t already have it.

Because it’s me, I decided to not only narrate the audiobook myself, but also record a musical version of the book where I sang, played guitar, and mixed in sound effects. Am I good singer? No. Am I a good guitar player? Also, no. Do I know how to produce songs? Again, no.

Did I do all those things anyway? Yes!

Do I think it turned out okay? I think it turned out more than okay. I think it’s a lot of fun! I wasn’t going for perfection, more an experience that was real that kids would like. What’s more fun than having an author sing their book to you while playing guitar? Honestly, it was a lot of fun to make it as well.

That also means that the long-awaited audiobook of Mommy’s Night Before Christmas is also on the way. I know, I promised you that last year, but I didn’t get all my ducks in a row in time for a holiday release. But you’re really getting it this year!

While we’re still in spooky season, my upper middle grade book Witch Test is on sale for the whole month of October! Eighth grade is a bubbling cauldron of rumors in this Mean Girls meets The Craft book for tweens and teens. Get it for just $2.99 at my Purchase Books page (my favorite place for you to buy my books), Bookshop, Amazon, Itch, Kobo, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, and more.

The next book in the Family Holiday Tales series GRAMMY’S HALLOWEEN SCARE is out in the world! Once again, illustrator Phoebe Cho has created an atmospheric setting for characters that pop off the page. We get new characters in Grammy and her black cat Jellybean, but we also get the return of a bunch of spooky kids who you might recognize from the other books in the series. Grammy’s tale is the culmination of many things I love with Halloween, witches, and crows all making an appearance.

GRAMMY’S HALLOWEEN SCARE can be found at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and Kobo. It took a surprising amount of research to make this book come together, so here’s the story of what inspired me to write it.

A witchy page from the book THE BEDTIME KNIGHT, written by Katie L. Carroll and illustrated by Erika Baird.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. Anyone who’s ready my middle grade novel WITCH TEST knows I have a soft spot for witches. A “witch” even makes an appearance in my picture book THE BEDTIME KNIGHT.

When it came time to figure out what holiday I wanted to highlight for the third Family Holiday Tales book, I wanted to do something other than Christmas, so Halloween was the obvious next choice for me. I’d already featured a mom and a dad in the other books in the series. A grandparent was a logical next choice, and a witchy grandma felt like a no-brainer!

I also had to figure out what I would use as the rhythmic inspiration for the book. MOMMY’S NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS is based off the famous poem by Clement C. Moore “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” and DADDY’S 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS can be sung to the tune of the classic Christmas carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” For my witchy grandma, there wasn’t anything obvious that came to mind. It also had to be something that was in the public domain.

Then I remembered this song I used to sing in music class around Halloween time. It started with kids singing, “There was an old woman all skin and bones, ooo-ooo-oo-ooo.” It end with a deep-voiced “boo!” for a jump scare. A quick search, and I found the musical version from when I was a kid. There was no YouTube back then, so we didn’t have a video to go with the music.

I loved that silly, slightly scary song. A little more research led me to the book SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell. Those books terrified me as a kid…in a way that I loved! The book version (below as performed in the audiobook by George S. Irving ) was even more disturbing than the one I used to sing. It also gave me the important clue that it was from an old folk song.

Even more research led to me to more versions of the song, each one seemingly more disturbing than the last! The different recordings of the song were simply haunting (see “Skin and Bones” sung by Jean Ritchie and scroll down for this unknown singer performing “Skin and Bones”). I wasn’t able to trace the exact origin of the song, but my research showed it was certainly old enough to be safe to use as inspiration for my book.

GRAMMY’S HALLOWEEN SCARE is more fun than scary. It can be sung to the tune of the song I grew up singing, and I included sheet music with my lyrics in the front of the book. I’ve done a couple of read-alouds of the book, and the young audiences have loved singing along on the “ooo-ooo-ooo” part. Here’s a video of me singing the book!