Customer Reviews

Stories for Around the Campfire

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are interested in camping out in the woods, and telling ghost stories this book would be a great read. My favorite tale is "The Boy Who Cried Werewolf" which is a take-off of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" story. Harriot is effective at being both funny and scary with this story whose ending is reminiscent of shaggy-dog stories. The second half of the book has some pretty frightening works, like "A Night at the Delany House", which is a creepy tale about two kids who are dared to stare at a haunted house for a night. Kids will love it, especially the funny ones.

This handy little book was written for the Boy Scout leader, to give you stories to tell around the campfire, as well as tips on how to tell them. There are twenty-four stories here: ten funny stories, and fourteen scary ones. Couple all that with the Telling A Story chapter, and you have got yourself a handy Scout resource!

Now that I am going on some Scout campouts, I have found the desire to be able to tell some "ghost" stores at the campfire, and this book (which is NOT an official BSA publication, by the way) is a nice thing to have. The stories are great, but I must say that their length at six pages does rather tax my memorizing abilities. That said, though, I did like this book, and highly recommend it.

Fun book to have with you when camping with kids! A few stories may not suit children too young, but otherwise, light and great around a campfire!

As the cover of this book would suggest, Ray Harriot's collection of original campfire stories is meant for Boy Scouts, although they can be adapted for telling to other kinds of youth groups.

Being used to working with older youths myself, I found some of these stories (particularly the first ten) too silly for use with the 13-and-up crowd. That doesn't mean they are not good stories. They have potential, but are better suited for Cub Scouts and Webelos. An example is "The Boy Who Cried Werewolf," which is every bit as obvious as its title sounds.

The latter fourteen tales are more ghostly and weird, but not violent or very scary. I'd compare the plots to something one might see in a "Scooby-Doo" short. Still, youths under the age of 14 will like them, particularly if told in a dynamic, animated fashion. Harriot offers a variety of themes here, from Indian legends and ghosts from long-ago battles that seem plausible, to the familiar "dare-to-spend-the-night-in-a-haunted-house" story with a nice surprise ending. At least these tales are original, so they're worth adding to your collection.

Besides the general dissatisfaction I had with the joke stories in the first part of the book, production elements cost this title another star. The dialogue could use some tweaking, and many pages are littered with distracting typesetting errors. Ten pages in the beginning of the book are spent on storytelling advice that could best be summed up as "Duh!" A whopping eight blank pages are left at the tail end, each bearing the heading "Notes," and even the back cover is blank. That having been said, this ten-year-old book could shine with a redo.

-Byron C. Justice,
author of Haunted Camps
and Violent Night

This book is definitely geared to Scout camping. The guy can't write an interesting story,but I guess he's not an author but a scoutmaster and was trying to get his tales on paper for others to use as their own.
the typeface in book is also quite amateurist.

that being said, it does have one redeeming merit, it does have a bit in the beginning regarding campfire storytelling advice, which I found quite helpful. If you take the time to change stories and make them your own, and don't read them verbatum, then and only then could this collection possibly be a hit around the fire.