Book Review: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Three Books to Chill Your Bones collected by Alvin Schwartz
A special book review for Halloween.
Scary Stories to tell in the Dark: Three Books to Chill Your Bones collected by Alvin Schwartz. Narrated by Patton Oswalt, Melissa McBride and Alex Brightman. Harper Collins, 2020. 4 hours (approx.).
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Halloween! I have decided to spend the month of October writing Halloween themed posts. We begin with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Three Books to Chill Your Bones collected by Alvin Schwartz.
This audiobook treasury contains all three of the “Scary Stories” books: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981), More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1984), and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones (1991). They are narrated, respectively, by Patton Oswalt, Melissa McBride and Alex Brightman.
Oswalt is the best of the three narrators. As a comedian, he brings a touch of humor even while reading the more frightening tales. You may object, a scary story should not be funny whatsoever. But many of us break out into laughter after the screams subside. Of course, some of the stories in this book are meant to be funny. Part five of book one is nothing but humorous tales ... with a hint of horror.
“The Viper” is one such humorous tale. A woman receives a distressing phone call. “I am the viper. I am coming in three days.” She shrugs it off as a prank. But each day the viper calls. “I’ll be there in two days,” he declares. And then one day. The woman calls the police. Later, the doorbell rings. She opens it expecting an officer. Instead there is a short man in overalls holding a bucket and a squeegee. “I am the vindow viper. I am here to vipe your vindows.”
Many of these stories you will already be familiar with. They are the kind of tales kids tell each other at sleepovers or camp counselors tell around the fire. Every boy sang a version of “The Hearse Song” in the school yard. And we all know the story of “The Hook”: a boy and his girlfriend are making out in the car at some remote place. The radio newscast proclaims that a murderer has escaped the local asylum. He can be identified by the hook for his missing left hand. The girlfriend gets so scared she demands to be taken home. The boyfriend reluctantly agrees. Before he drives away, they hear a scraping along the side of the car. Later, they find a hook hanging from the door handle.
“A Ghost in the Mirror” explains how a spooky party game is played. You shut yourself into the bathroom, turn out the light and summon a ghost usually by reciting “Bloody Mary” three to five times, or some variant of that. Supposedly, the ghost will appear in the mirror. The first one to scream or run away losses.
“Just Delicious” is one I remember fondly. It was told to my class by a teacher while we waited on a broken down school bus. In the version my teacher told, it was a boy who took the liver from a freshly buried corpse and fed it to his mother. Schwartz says it was a wife who fed the human flesh to her husband. In any event, the corpse comes searching for its missing piece. “Who has my liver?” it moans from the entry. “Who has my liver?” it repeats from the bottom of the steps. “Who has my liver?” it says yet again from just outside the bedroom door.
“You got it!”
Schwartz wrote these books not just to collect these urban legends and folklores, but also to be a practical guide on how to tell such “jump” stories. He sprinkles in parenthetical advice such as to pick a member of the audience and jump at him or her when you say, “You got it!”
While Scary Stories is a great resource, reading it as an anthology of fiction may leave you unsatisfied. For example, some of the tales have unclear endings. In “Maybe You Will Remember” a girl and her mother are staying at a hotel. The mother becomes very ill. The girl goes on a long journey to acquire medicine. When she returns none of the hotel staff remember her or her mother. Even the room has changed. The story ends with no explanation.
“Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!” makes no sense. A boy and his dog spend the night at a haunted house. The ghost sings the titular phrase. The dog - yes, the dog! - replies by singing, “Lynchee Kinchy Colly Molly Dingo Dingo!” A bloody head falls out of the chimney. The dog dies in fright. The head screams, “AAAH!”
A story like “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!” may not make a lot of sense, but it doesn’t need to. Imagine the story teller singing “Me tie dough-ty walker,” from across the fire in a ghostly voice. With each repetition his voice gets louder, more angry. At the climax he roars, “AAAH!” As Schwartz writes in the introduction to book one, scary stories are “meant to be told.” The entertainment value is in the telling, not necessarily in the story itself.
Two of my favorite stories are about witches. In “Such Things Happen” a man is being harassed by a witch. He draws an image of her on a tree and starts a nail through its heart. Each day he returns and drives the nail deeper. Meanwhile, the witch grows weaker until she at last dies.
In “A New Horse,” a man claims a witch sneaks into his room at night and turns him into a horse. A skeptical friend agrees to switch beds with him. Sure enough the witch comes. The friend, however, is able to break the spell and, moreover, cast it on the witch herself! He takes her to get fitted with horseshoes. When she reverts to human form, the horseshoes remain nailed in her hands and feet.
This October pick up Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Three Books to Chill Your Bones and listen to all the stories - during the day if you need to. Practice reciting them, perhaps, in a mirror (just don’t summon any ghosts). Then, on Halloween night regale your kids and friends with one or more of these stories.
Which one (or ones) will you choose? Do you have any scary stories of your own?