I recently dug out my boxed set of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which I purchased at a book fair sometime in my childhood. The books are in good shape, so they will pass to my daughter when I decide she’s old enough for them. An astute reader might notice that I refer to these books in Dead 2 Rites: When Van Halensing gives Jake a “traditional formula” for compelling a ghost, that formula comes from the story “The Haunted House.”
If you grew up in the Eighties or Nineties, you probably remember these three books, and they probably made you pee your pants. The stories are rewritten versions of folk tales that the author, Alvin Schwartz, an amateur folklorist, dug up from anthropological journals and fairy tale collections. For the adult reader, the most interesting sections of the Scary Stories books are the endnotes, in which Schwartz explains where he got his material as well as his rationale for altering or synthesizing it. A child will be more interested in the stories themselves, but the stories aren’t the main reason these books are both famous and infamous.
No, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark terrified a generation not with its tales of ghosts and monsters but with its illustrations, a morbid collection of surrealist pen-and-ink pictures by the reclusive Stephen Gammell. Even now, as an adult, I’m straining hard to avoid peeing my pants as I thumb through these volumes and revisit the stuff of my childhood nightmares.
Okay, not really. But still.
Ban It
According to the American Library Association, the books of the Scary Stories series were among the most “banned” books of the Nineties. However, it’s important to keep in mind that when the ALA says a book is “banned,” they mean that a parent complained one time or that the book got moved from the children’s to the adult section.
And by the way, despite their claims of neutrality, librarians have always been moral busybodies; during Reconstruction, when public libraries as we know them first came to be, librarians considered it their duty to ween people of those nasty novels and get them to read edifying works instead. By contrast, today’s librarians think they’ve failed in their mission if they don’t convince your nine-year-old daughter to bind her breasts and demand puberty blockers. Librarians’ ideas of morality have changed, but their insufferably remains the same.
Banned Library has a timeline of book challenges for Scary Stories. The reasons given include “unacceptably violent,” “the occult, the devil, and satanism,” and simply being too scary for children.
Granted, some people, the Jack Chick types, will call just about anything “the occult.” And many of the stories do indeed contain violence. But these books were considered shocking while other collections of ghost stories for children remained unnoticed. That is almost certainly because of the illustrations.
If Schwartz had made the books’ educational elements more prominent (turning his endnotes into story introductions, for example) and if the pictures had been less disturbing, these books would probably have sparked little if any controversy—and also would have never become bestsellers. Schwartz’s publishers understood this: When fielding letters from angry parents, their standard reply was that the stories were based on traditional tales.
The New Controversy
Funny enough, because many people grew up with these books and remember them fondly, an attempt to mess with them can create controversy much as the original publication did. I learned only a few days ago that my boxed set of Scary Stories was, for a short while, worth a significant amount of money: In 2011, Harper released a new edition with toned-down and sanitized illustrations; naturally, this incensed all the people who grew up moistening their shorts with the uncensored originals, so the editions featuring Gammell’s original pen-and-ink drawings briefly became collectors’ items, selling for hundreds. Harper then relented and rereleased the books with the original pictures.
Although the 2011 editions mostly get hate, Susie Rodarme at Book Riot gives an alternate opinion, arguing that the 2011 illustrations are easier for children to handle and more relevant to the stories they illustrate. As an example, she points to the original illustration of the story “Oh, Susannah!,” which is a good example of how Gammell’s pictures can be simultaneously disgusting and fascinating:
This picture has nothing to do with the story it illustrates; it is purely a work of surrealism, a still-frame of a nightmare. The story it accompanies is an urban legend about a young woman who discovers that her roommate has been murdered and that the killer is still close by, and Rodarme argues that this image does not belong with such a tale. She has a point, but I would reply that it is not the story alone nor the dreary image alone that produces fright: It is instead the juxtaposition of the two, the sense that they are somehow related, though it’s impossible to tell how.
The Doughty Walker
For me, one story from these collections was the scariest of all and succeeded in keeping me up at night, though I can no longer say why. The story itself is a silly, formulaic ghost story, and the image accompanying it is hardly Gammell’s most grotesque. Nonetheless, this one got to me:
I don’t know why this scared me so much. Perhaps it was the particular situation the story describes or the way it builds tension. Maybe it disturbed me because the ending is ambiguous and the fate of the protagonist is unknown. Maybe it bothered me because a dog dies.
Comments
The question of whether these are really harmful to children is probably not one anybody can answer with certainty. We can dismiss the claims that these stories are “occult” or “satanic”: That’s the same kind of prudery that bans dancing or card games. The claim that the stories are immoral in their content is also plainly false: Like so many ghost stories, most of these feature people who get their comeuppance for being greedy, proud, or otherwise wicked. It’s a harsh kind of justice, but it is justice. And the violence, too, is not beyond what a reader will find in most fairy tale compendia. Indeed, these stories are less violent than the typical ending of a tale from the Brothers Grimm.
But they are scary in a way that Grimm’s tales are not, mainly because they have those illustrations to accompany them. According to some online articles, many parents complained simply because they were frustrated with children who could no longer sleep at night. I well believe it: I had the same trouble when I read these books so many years ago, though I don’t recall my parents ever trying to take them away from me.
I doubt this did me any long-term damage, though I also doubt it did me any good. Looking over these books now, I think Schwartz should have done what I suggested earlier—write introductory notes for each story that describe where it came from and what sort of people told it. That would have made these books more enlightening to children and might have calmed some parental fears as well.
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