Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

The Preface to Schwartz’s book cites the centrality of storytelling as a pastime—even a fundamental impulse—as ancient and prolific as humanity itself. Scary stories, in particular, he suggests, have always had a special potency since “most of us like being scared” (2), as long as the danger exists only in imagination. Science tells us that the thrill of a well-told horror story releases a rush of adrenalin and other “fight-or-flight” hormones into our bodies, often leaving us with a glow of well-being and confidence. Scary stories also allow us to face some of our worst fears vicariously in a safe setting, preparing us mentally for the real thing. Schwartz notes that many of these stories, including some in his book, feature ghosts, witches, vampires, devils, and zombies, but these bogeymen have long served as proxies for real-life fears and anxieties, which is why they have retained so much of their disquieting sense of menace well into the modern age. The Preface also adds dimension to the theme of The Impact of Setting in Horror Storytelling. While the theme most prominently refers to the setting found in the stories, the Preface also makes clear that the setting for the storytelling is crucial to making these stories scary. A dark space, Schwartz points out, amplifies the fear factor of these tales, providing an atmosphere for the stories to be most effective in scaring the listener/reader.

The stories in this collection, Schwartz emphasizes, are meant to be read aloud and (ideally) with a keen sense of drama. They should be read at night, he says, and enunciated slowly and with a soft voice to keep the listeners on tenterhooks, foregrounding the theme of The Power of Stories Read Aloud. This is particularly true of the stories in Part 1, which are all jump stories, orchestrated specifically to be read aloud; in fact, they even include stage directions for the reader, telling them how to “act” out the climactic events. Above all, they require a sense of timing and a flair for drama from the reader, as the teller must bring the stories’ monsters (and other dangers) to shocking life with actual jumps, stamps, and screams—catching the listeners by surprise every time, even if they know the story. A performance of “The Big Toe,” for instance, must weave a spell of mounting dread as the mutilated seeker of the eaten toe staggers into the protagonist’s house, into his room, and up to his bed; this hushed, creeping tension is released only by the reader’s jump and shout: “YOU’VE GOT IT!” (9). In his Notes, Schwartz identifies “The Big Toe” as one of only two jump stories that are still widely known. (The other is “The Golden Arm,” a tale beloved by Mark Twain, a reader/performer par excellence.) This could reflect the printed word’s ascendancy over the (dying) oral traditions that were particularly suited to this very performative type of story. Nevertheless, Schwartz follows “The Big Toe” with five additional jump stories, all of them similar in their rising tension, escalating morbidity, and sudden, violent denouement.

“The Walk” isolates its listeners on a lonely road in a darkening landscape, with no companion but a nervous stranger (“the man”) who may or may not mean them harm. This sense of vulnerability and entrapment tightens as the path winds into a forest, a place where, in stories of this kind, terrible things happen. The almost lullaby-like repetition of the language, with ever-intensifying adverbs (“very scared” to “really scared” to “terrible scared”), ratchets the tension almost hypnotically until the reader shatters it mid-sentence with a sudden, mysterious scream. “What Do You Come For?” also uses repetition—in this case, a slow, ghoulish precipitation of body parts out of a chimney—to create a drumbeat of macabre suspense, the cadence of which is suddenly, shockingly broken by the reader’s violent foot stomp and shout. This escalating reiteration, which both lulls and unnerves the listener, priming them for the climactic shock, finds its ultimate example in “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!,” in which two nonsense verses are repeated again and again, louder each time, until (as in “What Do You Come For?”) a severed head tumbles down the chimney, screaming at the listener. This use of repetitive language and rising volume, both classic features of the oral tradition, is much less effective when the story is read alone and silently. Additionally, the jump scares—the action cues for the reader to stamp, point, jump, or scream—only really work in a live reading.

The last two jump stories are rhyming poems, the first of which (“A Man Who Lived in Leeds”) uses a series of dreamlike similes to lull the listener: “And when the snow began to melt, / It was like a ship without a belt. / And when the ship began to sail, / It was like a bird without a tail” (17). These lines echo the rhythmic, repetitious phrases of the earlier jump stories, but now as verses of an actual poem. Again, the rhythm is broken by sudden violence, a jump, and a scream: “I was dead, dead, dead indeed! / (Jump at your friends, and scream:) / ‘AAAAAAAAAAAH!’” (17). “Old Woman All Skin and Bone,” a song complete with musical notation, uses its rhythms and cooing refrain (“O-o o-o o-o!”) in the same way, setting up the listener for the “jump.” As in “What Do You Come For?,” the gruesome imagery escalates throughout the poem (“The worms crawled out, and the worms crawled in” [18]) so that the reader’s scream, when it comes, both shocks the listener and gives voice to their own mounting disgust. As such, the stories’ “jumps” serve as a cathartic release for the listener after the ever-growing tension and morbidity of the build-up.

Notably, five of the six stories in Part 1 feature mutilation and body horror, an overarching theme of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Illustrator Stephen Gammell more than echoes this gruesome refrain in his lurid black-and-white drawings, almost every one of which dwells on some aspect of goriness or body horror. His illustration for “Old Woman All Skin and Bone,” for instance, pictures even the town preacher as a cadaverous ghoul who, like the titular old woman, appears to be oozing blood. Though Schwartz says that his stories, particularly those in Part 1, are best read aloud, Gammell’s unique drawings certainly add their own dimension of horror, exemplifying The Macabre Marriage of Illustration and Text.