 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to 31 Days of Halloween. It is Classics Week. So today we are talking about just one short story out of an entire collection and that is The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. A little backstory here Sleepy Hollow or the the Headless Horseman, one of my favorite monsters of all time. I have a lot of nostalgia from my childhood, especially the Disney short cartoon. Fantastic, amazing. I love every bit of it. I'm also a tremendous fan of Tim Burton's movie Sleepy Hollow. So I wanted to finally read the story because I'd never actually read it. I think it was read to me as a child, but I couldn't remember anything that happened in the beginning part. But what stuck with me, even with the cartoon, what stuck with me the most is the last scene, the very last bit of that. And that's what I want to point out here, because I didn't care too much for this story, but I am glad that it exists because of what it created, the lore and everything that it created, and it did spawn off some of my favorite content like the Tim Burton movie and the old Disney classic cartoon. My problems with this story is that it is so overwritten. He describes everything in extreme detail, stuff that does not matter and does not pertain to the plot. Of course, that is the style back then. I know, I know, calm your chest meat. I understand. That's just how they wrote back then. Most of them were writing serial content and they wanted to get paid more, so they padded each episode with longer and longer stuff. This 40-page story, at least in this edition of the book, it's 40 pages. This 40-page story could easily be five pages long. It goes through him coming to town. It goes to him becoming a teacher. It goes through all the stuff that has no bearing whatsoever. There's not even really any character development. What you get is character description and description of items. There's description of tools hanging up on a wall that have no purpose whatsoever, description of a cluttered home, a whole cast of characters that bear no meaning to the plot whatsoever. But it's those last five pages. It's the last couple of pages. In fact, I would say the last page that really truly gets good. There's the subtext that I had never caught. Of course, everybody knows the story and the subtext is kind of lost if you know the story or you've seen the Disney cartoon. But when you see throughout the whole thing, spoiler alert, throughout the whole thing, you get to the ending and you see the headless horseman off in the distance. But then there's note that he's carrying his head and you don't know what the head is. Irving never tells you until the last couple of paragraphs where they say they found Ichabod cranes. What was it? Horse or something beside a busted pumpkin? I can't remember exactly what else they found. But it is a very striking image and it's the same image from the from the end of the Disney cartoon. The Disney cartoon, of course, cut out all the superfluous detail and what they did add was was visual. So you would see, you know, how well the how well the towns described in the actual artwork. And it is, other than not naming all of the characters, it is very what is a very good at adaptation. It follows the source material very closely. And but one thing that I noted that I never knew before were all the character names like the Vantassels, Brom Bones, all those people that Tim Burton repurposed for the movie. All those people are mentioned in here, but they have no purpose whatsoever, other than maybe Brom being jealous, you know, that kind of thing. Anyways, what's her name? Regina Vantassel, whoever Christina Ricci played in the movie, all those people are mentioned very in great detail, only for the story to turn out to be nothing about them whatsoever, have no bearing on the plot story, anything in the world. They was just building up this this town and then the actual event at the end kind of happens outside of town, over by the covered bridge. But anyways, that's my review of Sleepy Hollow. I give it three stars just because it exists and it created this wonderful monster, creature, presence, whatever you want to call the headless horseman that I am fond of and it brought back a nostalgic feeling reading this one, even though those first 35 pages were a hell of a chore. But if you read the Legend of Sleepy Hollow or anything else in or any of the other stories in this one, I'd love to hear if any of the other stories are any good. Rip Van Winkle is in here also. If they're any good, let me know down there in the doobly-doo. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another episode of 31 Days of Halloween. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.