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![]() We often identified with the characters, too. She sat in the dark staring into the night.” - “Like Cat’s Eyes” ![]() “As Jim Brand lay dying, his wife left him with his nurse and went into the next room to rest. At times, however, he dove deeper, giving us passages that added depth to our idea of death and mortality, and left our vulnerable imaginations festering with fear. For those of us who managed to get past the jarring drawings, to read the stories themselves, there’s no doubt that we were fascinated ghosts, ghouls, bloody fingers, and decapitated heads-Schwartz delivered all the cheap thrills. For some, Scary Stories became the foundation of a literary obsession, building us up toward bigger beasts like Goosebumps, Fear Street, King, Koontz, and more. Schwartz drew on the sound structure of folklore to teach children the fundamentals of narrative, igniting in many of us a newfound passion for the written word. ![]() More notably, they were imaginative and viscerally descriptive, and they significantly expanded our understanding of the horror story, not to mention story in general. At an age where bigger texts were becoming more appealing than the picture books we’d grown up with, kids like me were drawn to the Scary Stories paperbacks for their transitional worth: Schwartz’s bite-sized narratives were easy, digestible reads, but they still challenged our literacy. Having read them anew, I can better appreciate why I, like others, fell in love with the books in the first place. Unlike other concerned citizens, my parents never attended a PTA meeting in the books’ opposition, but my mother did sell my copies at a garage sale a few years back fortunately, after I expressed interest in reading them again, she managed to track down an original set on eBay (thanks, Mom!). But while most of us attributed our childhood insomnia to the series’ nightmare-inducing pictures, the stories scared us just as bad, equal contributors to the ALA having cited the paperbacks as the most frequently challenged books of the ’90s. Only by giving the Blair Witch a hit of acid and a stick of charcoal could you truly rival Gammell’s calibre of dark artistry. At the time, our pre-adolescent eyes had never seen such disturbing works: an inky apparition with hollow eyes and rotting flesh a pair of gangly limbs hanging from a blackened mantle. Most of us recall Gammell’s work in detail, because the illustrations are so detailed. If you grew up in the ’80s or early ’90s, then there’s a good chance that you’re familiar with the series-if not for author Alvin Schwartz’s grisly retelling of campfire folklore, then undoubtedly for Stephen Gammell’s haunting illustrations. “D on’t you ever laugh as the hearse goes by, For you may be the next to die.” So starts “The Hearse Song,” one of the many dark fables found in the pages of Scholastic’s infamous Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books.
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