Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

A lifelong student of folklore and a connoisseur of ghostly chills and shocks, Alvin Schwartz (1927-1992) is the author of over 20 books for young readers, among them his popular collections of folktales, horror stories, tongue twisters, riddles, poems, songs, and superstitions. Though his writings cover many subjects, he is best known for a trio of horror collections created in collaboration with the artist Stephen Gammell and published between 1981 and 1991: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. These books, written mostly for children and young adults, are now regarded as classics of the genre, despite frequent attempts by nervous parents to ban them from school libraries.

A onetime journalist and English professor, Schwartz began freelance writing as a sideline in the 1960s, eventually building a prolific career with his deftly curated collections of old stories, poems, and songs, some hundreds of years old. Long fascinated by the oral traditions of stories, Schwartz streamlined his tales by reading them aloud to himself in a room with good acoustics, such as a bathroom, to sharpen their impact as spoken word. Moreover, to adapt his tales—notably those in his Scary Stories trilogy—into ideal vessels for the oral tradition, Schwartz stripped them down to their essentials, mostly leaving out descriptions and other extraneous details. This pared-down approach encourages those who read them aloud to embellish them as they go, just as oral storytellers have done for millennia. (The tales in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark are extremely brief, averaging about two pages each, yet all seem spacious in their tension and mystery.)

Folklore, like all oral traditions, is a constantly mutating body of work. Schwartz’s writing process always began at the library, with exhaustive research into the many published versions and permutations of the story, poem, or song that had caught his attention. In reducing a work to its most pungent, haunting essence, he looked for “patterns” to tell him which ideas, phrases, plot twists, and other details have, over the decades and continents, intrigued listeners the most. In sifting through stories with more or less the same premise, he looked for the most representative version, one that “typified” the genre. (For “The Big Toe,” an age-old tale with many variations, Schwartz even provides an alternate ending.) Though Schwartz adapted all the stories into accessible, modern vernacular, their origins span centuries: As he notes in the “Sources” section of Scary Stories, the ghost story “Cold as Clay” dates back to at least 1678. Other, more obviously recent tales (e.g., “High Beams” and “The Babysitter”) are twists on popular urban legends: tales dealing mostly with modern fears and anxieties and often passed around (though rarely with evidence) as “true” events. The oral origins of folktales, Schwartz believed, provide an empowering message for children since ordinary people created them just to pass the time, and they have since become timeless lore.

Many of Schwartz’s stories were adapted from ones he remembered fondly from childhood or read later in life; still others were told to him over the years by friends, neighbors, children, etc. In selecting and condensing them into their most memorable (and terrifying) form, he followed his instincts about what would most delight or appall his child self. In an interview, he acknowledged that most of these horror stories were originally adult fare; only much later did children begin whispering them back and forth like dark secrets. Modern children, Schwartz thinks, are “sophisticated” enough to enjoy them as entertainment and as a cathartic outlet for the fears and anxieties that haunt them (Shearn, Amy. “The Folklorist Behind Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.” JSTOR Daily, 25 July 2019). This is certainly true of his Scary Stories trilogy, which created a sensation among youngsters with a taste for horror when they first appeared in the 1980s and 1990s.

To be sure, some have credited the books’ phenomenal success (partly) to Gammell’s fantastical illustrations, which creepily complement Schwartz’s sketch-like stories with ghoulish lashes of gore and unease. Nightmarishly specific where Schwartz is stark and elliptic, Gammell’s macabre drawings have frequently drawn the ire of overprotective parents, securing Scary Stories’ place on the list of the “most challenged” library books in the US. Nonetheless, the trilogy has long thrilled generations of children and young adults as a pulse-quickening rite of passage and remains a fond memory for most. As with the uncanny, unstoppable “White Wolf” in the first Scary Stories book, the concerted efforts of over-zealous adults or “moral guardians” to abolish or defang it have thus far ended in defeat. As such, Schwartz’s and Gammell’s trilogy seems well on its way to joining the age-old wellsprings of ever-renewing folklore that it so memorably celebrates.