We all love scary stories, right?
It might be a little disingenuous to generalize an entire group of readers, but if you frequent the site often, it’s safe to assume that scary stories at least interest you. By ‘scary stories’, I don’t just boil it down to creepy books or shorts that you’ve read, for it can include media such as scary movies, horror games, or even horror-inspired music. Different mediums, yet they all serve the same purpose of telling a story to the consumer in the most emotionally effective way possible.
Sometimes though, the best scary stories are the ones you just tell your friends and family on any other night. No loopholes or anything; just a simple act of verbal storytelling to unnerve the listener(s). It all seems so much more real when you’re hearing these stories from a close figure in your life. There’s a level of trust that adds to the supposed reality of the stories and the best horror media is able to replicate that feeling with simplicity and ease.
This is one of the most appealing aspects of the classic children’s horror novels: the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” series from Scholastic. The books, which were common during school book fairs for millennials, presented themselves as a collection of short horror stories, often incredibly short in length yet tightly packed with visceral horror imagery quite uncommon for children’s books at the time.
Oftentimes, the stories themselves were only mildly creepy, but thanks to the illustrations from Stephen Gammell, readers were rewarded with overwhelmingly disturbing imagery to go along with the stories and enhance their scare factor. Almost all of the stories in this trilogy of books have this going for them, but there’s a handful of stories that manage to pack a hard punch in both illustration and writing.
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PDF Source – BoredBat
