We're in the dog days of summer, which means I just plain don't feel like watching movies. That means it's time for more musing on books this week. Yeah, yeah, I know - it's Lick Ness Monster's Horror MOVIE Mayhem. But it's my blog, I make the rules, and nobody reads it anyway.
Alvin Schwartz' "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" books were right up there with "Goosebumps" for kids in my age bracket. There were only three of them, but the impact that these things had were huge. Everybody at my grade school had checked out these well-worn babies at some point or another. And weirdly enough I always thought these books were BRAND-NEW in the early-'90s. The THIRD one was, but I was surprised to learn that the first book came out in 1981, with the first sequel following in '84. With the subject matter of these books, it really is reaffirming that the art of the campfire scary story is something that truly does know no age bracket. Which is why we need a remake of Are You Afraid of the Dark, stat.
What these books were all about should be pretty apparent from the covers. Mr. Schwartz went around the country gathering folktales and urban legends, modernized them as much as he could, and turned the stories into book form. It seems like such a no-brainer that I can't believe no one thought of the idea before this guy, so kudos to Alvin here for actually having the balls to do something about it. It is actually thanks to this book that I know a lot of the more popular urban legend stories. Just about everyone and their mother has heard the story of the young kids out on a date who hear about a serial killer on the loose with a hook for a hand. Yup, in here. Another classic is the story involving a woman driving home and being terrified by a vehicle repeatedly flashing its high beams, unsuspecting that a crazed killer is in her back seat and that the motorist is doing his best to save her life. Heard about it for the first time in here.
Take my word for it, if there is a scary story that made its rounds in the urban areas throughout the twentieth century, it is likely repeated in this book. Although the source of that "Where is my toooo-e-e-e-e-e-e?" story is a little sketchy. Leafing through these books today, I'm still amazed just how many of these things stuck with me through the years. One of them in particular, "Me Tie Dough-Ty Walker," traumatized me as a kid. Picture this - a kid makes a bet that he can spend a night in a haunted house where it's rumored that a severed head falls down the chimney every night. Yikes already, but stick with me. He brings his dog with him, and after midnight begins hearing a voice out in the distant woods. His dog begins singing back, giving up his location. And then the severed head falls down the chimney, and...brrrrrrr. Words cannot convey just how much this story affected me when I was young; nothing, bar for maybe a few segments of Unsolved Mysteries, had ever frightened me so profoundly, but it didn't get much better with some of the others. The second book has "One Sunday Morning," a story about a young girl who wakes up and goes to church only to find out that she is attending a service for the dead and summarily chased out by a group of mummies who shout "you don't belong here!" at her.
Complete with soul-crushing illustrations.
The illustrations in these books by Stephen Gammell are the probably the MAIN thing that kids who read them remember. They are, simply put, amazing. The black-and-white, abstract images conjure up just...nightmarish images in your mind, keeping the tension high even when the stories weren't quite up to snuff. There are all kinds of superlatives that I can come up with for these drawings, but take my word for it - Google image search "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" and get ready to be amazed.
Perhaps my favorite feature of the books was the closing chapters, focusing on more humorous entries and research notes. I tended to read the books cover-to-cover over the course of about three days, and it was always nice to wrap up with a few stories about friendly ghosts that ended with a snappy one-liner. And I could spend HOURS perusing the Notes section, where Schwartz goes into detail about where each story comes from, the respective years that they are believed to have been birthed, etc. There are also some good bits of advice about how to, you know, TELL these stories that are meant to be told in the dark. I can't say I ever used any of them, but they're there.
I'm not going to close this particular blog with any kind of "Top 10" list of my favorite stories because, truth be told, they're all pretty interchangeable. A lot of urban legends tend to be pretty similar - scary stories meant to teach a moral lesson, which is where these books differed greatly from the "Goosebumps" series that I reviewed last week. Suffice to say that these books were omnipresent in grade school libraries for a reason, and still stick around these days for that same reason. Scary stuff lives forever. Fear knows no date on the calendar. Thus, I would advise any horror fans out there to pick up copies of these books, because you can find them dirt cheap these days. You'd be hard-pressed to find a better collection of urban legends and scary campfire tales than this.
No comments:
Post a Comment