Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
Yes, we're obsessed with collections of folklore, the macabre, and ghost stories
WICKED TREE PRESS UPDATE
I am buried under research and reviewing art this morning but wanted to take a brief moment to check in with you all. I am also recovering from a weekend at the SFWA Nebula Conference. The comics and technology panel went really well, and I met some wonderful librarians, authors, and scientists at the event as well as reconnected with other creatives. Feeling grateful for that time.
Speaking of which, the time I spent chatting with a few librarians has me once again obsessing about the many scary short story collections that we all loved such as Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The collections I am referring to are a bit scarier than Goosebumps but not as scary as Stephen King. These stories stuck in our psyches during those formative tween years.
One that always stuck with me was The Golden Arm which I have definitely told to scare my nieces and daughters. I believe I first read it in The Haunted Closet: The Thing At the Foot of the Bed. The story has appeared in a many other collections such as Ghost, Ghosts, Ghosts: Stories of Spooks and Spirits, 13 Ghostly Tales, and Even More Tales for the Midnight Hour.
The Golden Arm is a folktale dating back at least 200 years that was created to teach its listener to respect the dead. It also has a great jump scare at the end which is why I love to tell it orally as do many storytellers. It is most often told orally and was famously used by Mark Twain to teach people how to tell a story. It is classified as A Corpse Claims Its Property story (ATU 366) in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type Classification System. This system is used by folklorist to catalogue folktales and is fascinating on its own.
I am writing a collection of these types of stories, and a version of The Golden Arm will for sure be in it. It’s always been one of my favs. One of the reasons I am writing this collection is because my youngest daughter demands it. She wants more scary stories that are scary, but not too scary. Honestly, don’t we all?
What were some of your favorite collections, tropes, or types of stories from this genre? Please share in the comments.
It sounds as if I'm older than most of you. At the risk or dating myself, when "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" came out, I was already a teacher. I also wrote my first, (as yet unpublished) novel that year. My teenage years were during what one critic called the YA Stone Age, which, among other things, had little horror and hardly any supernatural horror. (Lois Duncan wrote "I Know What You Did Las Summer" and similar during the period, but I was unaware of them at the time.) R. L. Stine started "Goosebumps" longer after I was a kid.
When I was in middle school, I remember watching the kind of Gothic soap opera that eventually became outright horror, "Dark Shadows." It wasn't intended for kids, but because it was during the day, the violence level was pretty low. Still, it had vampires, werewolves, witches from the 18th Century, possession, ghosts, time travel, parallel universes, various malevolent spell casters--all on a shockingly low special effects budget. (As if in unintended prophecy of Stephen King, the show was set in a small Maine town.) It also inspired my first attempt at a novel, which thankfully, I never finished. It was a little too close to its original inspiration.
"Carrie" was published in 1974, the year I graduated from high school, and I soon found it and became hooked on King. At some point before that, though, I'd found HP Lovecraft and read every horror story, as well as some of his early fantasy. I read a lot of other fantasy and science fiction as well, but I think Lovecraft and his circle were about the only horror I can immediately remember.
Not very chronological of me, but I should also mention reading D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths as a kid. Not horror (or even fantasy, unless we count all old myths as fantasy), but certainly influential in developing my interest in reading and in non-realistic fiction. But think about Greek myths a little--they're rampant with horror themes, even though the D'Aulaire presentation is pretty mild. Sons castrating their fathers. Sons killing both parents (Oedipus) or just Mom (Orestes). Cronus eating his children. Atreus serving his brother, Thyestes, a feast including the flesh of his murdered sons. Orpheus being ripped to pieces by Maenads. Heracles being driven mad by Hera (more than once) and murdering his own sons. Revenge. Intergenerational curses. Ghosts. Attempted infanticde. The first known werewolf stories (King Lycaon and his sons). Precursors to vampire stories (Empusa, Lamia). Oh, and let's not forget Procrustes, the host who stretched or cut people to fit his guest bed (I'm sure a forgotten precursor to all those motel horror stories.) Perhaps George R.R. Martin should do an adaptation of Greek myths--though that one shouldn't be for the kids.
One dark and stormy night three hobos sat around a campfire. One hobo looked at the other two and asked, do you want to hear a scary story? They both said yes and this is how it went. One dark and stormy night three hobos sat around a campfire. One hobo looked at the other two and asked, do you want to hear a scary story? They both said yes and ………..