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.