Folding Fun: Zombigami by Duy Nguyen

For holiday crafters for whom the quirkiest of pumpkin carving accomplishments is no challenge, Sterling Publishing has just the book.

Subtitled Paper Folding Fun for the Living Dead, Duy Nguyen's brand-new Zombigami (Sterling, 2011) catches the zombie mania with cast of kooky characters for the discriminating crafters--Starvin' Marvin, Seymour Guts, The Abominable Deadman, The Skull Crusher, Idle Hands, Phineas Gouge, and Susie Gravemaker.

Nguyen's book includes 50 sheets of origami paper and very detailed drawings to get the fumble-fingered on the way to the production of these spooky creations, organizing the items so that the book also provides instruction in several basic techniques in order of difficulty--the "valley fold," "mountain fold," "base fold," and "sink fold,"--to name a few, and each succeeding figure incorporates a new technique into those already introduced. Illustrations utilize different colors (grey and green) for the two sides of the item, making it easier to visualize the correct steps as the crafter goes along. Some of the figures require a bit of snipping or tearing as the finishing touches.

Zombigami requires a fair degree of digital dexterity, well within the capabilities of middle elementary students, with the added advantage of being a fun way to master those spacial relations visualization skills that will come back to, um, haunt teen students on those standardized tests out there in their future. Not to mention that the completed spooky projects are drop-dead impressive.

Diabolically Delish: Extreme Halloween: The Ultimate Guide to Making Halloween Scary Again by Tom Nardone

What would Halloween be if not for the extreme genius of Tom Nardone? Having come up with seemingly every devilishly delightful thing to do with a pumpkin in his best-selling Extreme Pumpkins: Diabolical Do-It-Yourself Designs to Amuse Your Friends and Scare Your Neighbors and his sequel Extreme Pumpkins II: Take Back Halloween and Freak Out a Few More Neighbors, (see my posts here,) in his newest, Extreme Halloween: The Ultimate Guide to Making Halloween Scary Again, our Halloween hero zooms his focus out to include all things spooky--extreme yard tricks and plenty of extreme craftings that turn any house or garage into a haunted house.

Outdoors there is plenty to amuse the neighbors and approaching trick or treaters--skull trees, hand-hammered wooden caskets, ghosts that seem to float and swoop down zip lines, porch scarecrows and ghouls, graveyards concocted from mulch, pumpkin heads, stuffed gloves, shoes, and other castoff clothing, and door decor with a surprise for those intrepid souls who dare to get that far.

Inside the house are cool ghoul food, bleeding baked goods, the toilet candy bowl, and other plentiful recipes for creepy comestibles. Then there is "the haunted lavatory," complete with skull soap, the terrifying toilet (Don't ask!), and the shadowy hangman in the shower. Inventive costume ideas abound, with hilarious suggestions for outfitting those lame guests who come cluelessly unadorned with the proper garb.

Nardone doesn't neglect his first love, the jack-o'-lantern, in this new book, however. There are flaming pumpkin heads (Caution: Warn Fire Department Before Using), graveyard jacks, pumpkin-head millipedes, and many other silly-spooky squash creations.

No library or ghostly trickster should be without these three handsome Halloween standbys, ghoulishly gigglesome, horrifically hilarious, and tantalizingly terrifying as Halloween itself should be.

More Max Jacks: Extreme Pumpkins II by Tom Nardone

Tom Nardone, author of the top-selling Extreme Pumpkins: Diabolical Do-It-Yourself Designs to Amuse Your Friends and Scare Your Neighbors and proprietor of his riotous website ExtremePumpkins.com, has a new volume out for the prankster in all of us, the outrageous Extreme Pumpkins II: Take Back Halloween and Freak Out a Few More Neighbors.

Nardone's stated goal for both books is to "reclaim Halloween from the cheerful, the cutesy, and the parent-sanctioned." This sequel advertises such artistic triumphs as the Demented Tool Man pumpkin depicted on the cover, as well as the Projectile Sneeze Pumpkin, Baseball-in-the-Eye Pumpkin, Doll-Eating Pumpkin, and Full-Diaper Baby Pumpkin. Nardone even, er, branches out to that twisted relative of the pumpkin, the gourd, to exorcise, er, I mean exercise, his dark-side-of-Martha-Stewart talents.

Although a loaded-diaper jackie o'lantern may be a tiny bit gross, it's a pretty funny concept that'll give trick or treaters and their bored parents a chuckle on the big night. And if you want to keep your 'tweeners and teeners around for at least part of Halloween night, have an Extreme Pumpkin Party with a take-home product to surprise and delight their own family and neighbors. It's a sorta, kinda, almost wholesome activity for merry pranksters who need to sublimate their drive to make mischief, and if you have the stomach for it, you can always make pumpkin pie out of the, er, remains.

For last season's review of Nardone's first book, see my post of October 12, 2007, here.

The "Everything" Pumpkin Kit: The Halloween Jack-o'-Lantern by Carlos deVito

Carlo de Vito's "kit" book, The Halloween Jack-O-Lantern: Everything You Need to Help You and Your Family Enjoy the Scariest Month of the Year! doesn't come with a big fat orange pumpkin to carve, but it has just about everything else you need to light your Halloween night.

De Vito's compact little kit includes a book which explains the origin of the jack-o-lantern. He includes versions of the tales of the "will o' the wisp" and of "Wicked John" or "Jack," who was such a mean-hearted trickster that he couldn't get into Heaven or the Devil's domain and was forced to wander with his lantern in the darkness through eternity. De Vito explains how the American pumpkin came to replace the European turnip and other vegetables as the preferred lantern for Halloween.

Also included in the book are a list of "famous pumpkin movies" from Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin to Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, classic pumpkin poems, and a scary tale by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Sure to be used are the recipes for yummy-sounding pumpkin pies, pumpkin cookies, roasted pumpkin seeds and even pumpkin chili. The basics of pumpkin carving are also laid out, step by step, with appropriate tools, clean-up advice, and safety instructions included.

The CD included in the kit features a flickering, candle-lit, and handsomely carved jack-o-lantern to display on your television screen during your Halloween party (a la the famous Yule log), as well as Halloween sound effects, including the usual screams and howls and spooky organ music.

As a bonus the kit contains stencils of various facial features for your own homemade jack-o-lantern, so that you can choose eyebrows, smiles or frowns, noses, ears, and other facial features to individualize your creation and amaze and delight your trick or treaters.

Not Your Father's Jack-o'-Lantern: Extreme Pumpkins by Tom Nardone

Here's a brand-new book which is just the thing for all you cut-ups out there who want to carve out a reputation as the kookiest punkin scultor in the neighborhood. The eye-catching cover really says it all: a bright orange Cannibal Pumpkin leers while its twisted mouth crunches down on a hapless baby pumpkin. The book's blurb calls it "a gleefully gory guide for nothing short of a manifesto to take back Halloween from the cutesy and the cheerful...."

Inside this handy paperback there are plenty more extreme creations for every taste (or lack thereof)--from an edible centerpiece Burger Pumpkin in which the two halves of the pumpkin shell form the bun around a giant beef patty with lettuce, tomatoes, special sauce, ya-da, ya-da, ya-da, to Nardone's signature Pukin' Pumpkin which literally spills its guts (seed and slimy pumpkin innards) all around.

One of the designs which is perhaps a little lower on the gross-out scale is the clever Worm Infested Pumpkin, an unhappy looking jack o'-lantern with gummy worms squiggling out of a series of round holes in his head. Higher up the gross-out chart is the Revolting Blood-filled Pumpkin, a practical joke waiting to happen, an innocent-looking uncarved pumpkin which spills "homemade blood" (recipe, page 10) when the clueless would-be carver makes his first cut.

Some of the other featured designs include the Roadkill-Eating Pumpkin (actual roadkill optional), the Brain Surgery Pumpkin (leaking "brains), and the Radioactive Pumpkin, lighted with glowsticks. All of these designs have excellent directions and lists of materials easily found at your local big box stores, and although they do require some adult participation in the process, there is plenty of room for creative kids to have a hand in the final product.

If you are involved in your hometown Halloween house of horrors or just want a jack-o'-lantern that'll give the trick-or-treaters something to think about, Nardone's Extreme Pumpkins: Diabolical Do-It-Yourself Designs to Amuse Your Friends and Scare Your Neighbors will help you carve a creation they'll never forget!