In explaining horror fiction for reader’s advisory librarians in The Reader’s Advisory Guide, Second Edition, Becky Siegel Spratford defined it as

…a story in which the author manipulates the reader’s emotions by introducing situations in which unexplainable phenomena and unearthly creatures threaten the protagonists and provoke terror in the reader.

We argued with her definition of horror fiction in our review, because here we consider genres such as human horror and killer animals as subgenres in horror fiction, as do many, many readers.

When I talk about scary stories for kids, I’m talking about something a little bit different, though, because what I consider “scary” doesn’t necessarily easily fall into genres (and sometimes it’s not especially scary, but has a focus on Halloween, or on creatures traditionally considered scary). I decided to ask my Monster Kid what he thought about all this.

Me: Does a scary story have to have a monster in it to be scary?

Monster Kid: No, a dripping, dark wood where you are lost is scary. That can be a scary story.

Me: So there doesn’t have to be a monster for the book to be a scary story?

Monster Kid: No, getting lost far away from your village in the dark is scary even without a monster. Even when there’s no monster, that’s a monster.

There you have it. You don’t need the unexplainable, otherworldly, or supernatural to make a scary story a scary story.

Here’s a list of the kinds of things that fall beneath the large umbrella of “scary stories” in children’s literature, according to several scholars in the subject:

Nursery rhymes
Fairy tales
Where the Wild Things Are and other picture books
A Series of Unfortunate Events
The Graveyard Book
A Tale Dark and Grimm
The Vampire Diaries
Twilight
The Hunger Games

Whether all of these REALLY qualify as scary stories (or horror, for that matter), or whether I should include Halloween books and not-so-scary monster tales in the “scary stories” category here, is certainly up for debate. But that dark and dripping wood that emerged from the mind of my six year old son… well, he certainly scared me with that, more than any monster could.