scary stories to ban in the dark

Halloween is poking its little head around the corner -- for me, a deeply nostalgic holiday. Children are often drawn to the macabre and the weird, because that’s their existence: growing pains, lost teeth, with new dangers learned about and confronted and not yet made peace with. Halloween is the season to celebrate their most creepy selves, but the horror section of school libraries is always open, with books that let kids face fears head-on. I’m sure others can relate to younger me begging the school librarian for directions to the scary stuff. It was a sparse section then, in the early 2000s, with its crowning jewel being Alvin Schwartz’ three-part series “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”

Y’all remember those books: bite-size tales of ghosts and ghouls, death and mayhem, accompanied by Stephen Gammell’s iconically horrifying illustrations in dripping black and white. They’ve been the stuff of nightmares for several generations. But October’s a good time to reminisce on “Scary Stories” not only because of Halloween; the first through seventh of the month also marks Banned Books Week. According to the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom, Scary Stories was, between 1990-1999, the most challenged book in America. In the 00s, it moved down to number 7.

An example illustration

Parent groups, individual parents, and even a legislative action committee raised concerns, claiming that some of the disturbing or violent content was not appropriate for children. In a 1993 interview with Chicago Tribune, Sandy Vanderburg, a mother former teacher, brought up perhaps a common complaint about the stories: "There's no moral to them. The bad guys always win. And they make light of death. There's a story called `Just Delicious' about a woman who goes to a mortuary, steals another woman's liver, and feeds it to her husband. That's sick." In the same article, the author was compared to serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Schwartz was unphased by the controversy. In an interview with Inverse, Cody Meirick (creator of Scary Stories: A Documentary) said, “Alvin Schwartz really loved the fact that his books were being banned. The attention to censorship within schools and libraries was just beginning to take shape around the time of his passing in the early 1990s. The American Library Association really started tracking and making lists in the mid-1980s, which was when his books began to really take off. But Alvin loved it and thought it was great publicity.” There is something particularly appealing about the controversial stuff when you’re younger, isn’t there? The books continue to garner fans, and even received a film adaptation in 2019.

The first volume of “Scary Stories” was also republished on its 30th anniversary with less-nightmarish illustrations, now done by illustrator Brett Helquist, a former missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who is best known for his drawings in the 13 “Series of Unfortunate Events” books. Though gorgeous in their own right, these new “Scary Stories" illustrations just didn’t do it for fans of Gammell’s OG drawings. In 2017, the books were republished with the original artwork. 

Newer cover by Helquist

 

An example of Helquist's illustration

Flipping back through “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” as a grown adult, I was impressed by its packed bibliography, several spanning pages in a book that doesn’t have that many pages to begin with. Schwartz was a passionate folklorist, and put great research into his work. In an interview with Language Arts Magazine, he said of his process: “Basically, what I do with every book, is learn everything I can about the genre. This will involve a lot of reading and scholarly books and journals and sometimes discussions and scholarly folklorists... In the process of accumulating everything on a subject, I begin setting aside things that I particularly like. What's interesting is that eventually patterns emerge.” Wherever you stand on the question of how much violence or horror young readers should be exposed to, you can’t deny that a monstrous amount of work went into these books, and that even today, they remain a key title in the world of creepy fiction, as well as a contested title for concerned parents.