Home » Posts tagged "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" (Page 2)

Teen Read Week: Stories to Give You the Shivers

As I’ve said in the past, what better audience could there be for short stories than the teen audience? For every teen who loves hauling around gigantic tomes, there is another who prefers to consume reading material one small, satisfying, bite at a time.  October is the season for short and scary stories, in my opinion– a fall campfire is the perfect occasion for the right tale,  or a sleepover could involve tempting “Bloody Mary” out of the mirror.  There are so many opportunities to fit a scary story in as we approach the day of the dead.

So here’s a short list of short story collections you (and by you I mean anyone, but especially teens) can check out if you’re seeking out a story to give you the shivers.

 

    The Restless Dead: Ten Original Tales of the Supernatural, edited by Deborah Noyes. With authors like Kelly Link and Annette Curtis Klause contributing, you will surely find something here to give you the creeps.

 

 Fear: 13 Stories of Suspense and Horror,  edited by R.L. Stine.  This collection has an interesting collection of writers, including F.Paul Wilson and Heather Graham, who write thrillers for adults, and Peg Kehret, who writes middle grade mysteries and suspense. So it’s not surprising that the collection is somewhat of a mixed bag– but there’s also quite a lot of variety!

 

 All Hallows’ Eve: 13 Stories by Vivian Vande Velde. This is an individual collection, and again, these are stories of the supernatural and spooky rather than the gory. Vivian Vande Velde is a fantastic writer and this could be a good way to see if you like her stuff before trying out a longer work. And, of course, this collection is thematically about Halloween, so how could I leave it out?

 

 Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link. One of the stories in this book, “The Wrong Grave”, is also in The Restless Dead, mentioned above. So if you tried that and liked it, definitely pick up Pretty Monsters.  These are not typical scary stories, but they’ll definitely creep you out!  Kelly Link is a favorite author of mine, and I really recommend this one.

 

 Extremities: Tales of Death, Murder, and Revenge by David Lubar is his first venture into the young adult genre. We’re giving a copy away this week, that’s how good it is!

 

 Ghostly Gallery: Eleven Spooky Stories for Young People edited by Alfred Hitchcock. This is just one of a series of short story anthologies that Hitchcock published in the 1970’s and that were available in libraries and through Scholastic book orders in the 1980s as well. It’s really a tragedy that these volumes and others like them are no longer in print, as most of the early exposure I had to scary stories was through these types of books.

 

 Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories edited by Roald Dahl. You may think of Roald Dahl as a children’s author, but he also wrote for adults and really, even in his children’s books, proves that he is a master of the macabre. His choices here include many older, classic, ghost stories, from authors such as Sheridan Le Fanu, Edith Wharton, and Robert Aickman. These are literary horror stories, some quite frightening, so I’d recommend it for older teens.

 

The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural by Patricia McKissack, illustrated by Brian Pinkney. These stories have the eerie feeling of truth to them, possibly because of McKissack’s introduction, where she describes listening to the stories the adults around her told when she was a child. This is a Caldecott Award winner, and also a Coretta Scott King award winner, but beyond that, it’s just really good storytelling, made even better by the dramatic illustrations. I have this on Kindle, and I’ve got to say, this is one of the books that you really need to hold in your hands and see the artwork complementing the story across a double page spread, to truly appreciate. Don’t let the award for children’s book illustration fool you: this book is often used with and appreciated by middle school aged kids and older.

 

 The Scary Stories Treasury: Three Books to Chill Your Bones, Collected From Folklore, edited by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell.  Make sure you have the books illustrated by Stephen Gammell. I don’t care how old you are, these are still scary. And I’m definitely not the only one to think so– read this article and you’ll see what an impact these books make.

I really can’t follow that up with anything better, so I’ll stop now and give you a chance to track these down and give yourself a fright!

Posted on October 17, 2013 by , Reply

Banned Books Week: America’s Top Ten Countdown

 

Hey, it’s Banned Books Week!  The news is out now from ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom– the top ten banned and challenged titles for the year! And we’re counting them down here, just like Casey Kasem!

Thank you, Casey Kasem, for counting them down with us!

At number 10, Beloved by Toni Morrison took the place of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.  Both titles are often challenged, and have appeared on and off the top ten list over the last several years.

At number 9, newcomer The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls took the place of The Gossip Girls series by Cecily von Ziegesar, a series that has been in and out of the top 10 over the last ten years.

At number 8, Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a favorite here that’s no stranger to challenges (last seen on the top ten list in 2008), jumped back into the top ten, displacing What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones, which also made the top ten in 2010 and 2011.

At number 7, newcomer Looking for Alaska by John Green displaced Brave New World  by Aldous Huxley. Brave New World had been in the top ten since 2010.

At number 6, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, which also made the list in 2008, took the place of the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor,  which has made the list three times in the past ten years.

At number 5,  the heartwarming story of a penguin family, And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, moved The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie… but we haven’t seen the end of that, so stay with me! As a side note, And Tango Makes Three has been number one four times and number 2 once in the past ten years already. Those penguins are alarming folk, apparently.

At number 4, the controversial erotica title Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, overshadowed My Mom’s Having a Baby! A Kid’s Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy by Dori Hillestand Butler.

At number 3, Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher displaced… The Hunger Games trilogy. Yes, really. With all the media attention directed to The Hunger Games, I’m kind of surprised those books didn’t make the top ten.

At number 2, guess what shows up? The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie actually moved UP the list, displacing The Color of Earth, a Korean manga series, entirely.

And… the number one banned or challenged book in the United States this past year is….. drumroll, please….

CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS!  

Now, I’m not a fan of potty humor, but really? What does this say about us as a society that the books most objected to in the country are challenged because of poop jokes?  Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series knocked the series ttyn; ttyl; l8r, g8r by Lauren Myracle out of first place. Both series have had frequent appearances, in the top ten, though. That means her books will probably be back.

Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to have a list like this every year? It’s great to hear how we should all promote literacy and do our best to put books into kids’ hands, to give them ownership. But look at the books in our top ten countdown here. Every one of them is a book a teen or child might read. Some might only read them in school, but some of them are absolutely written for and intended to be set in the hands of the people we want to be growing readers and thinking individuals. So a book makes a few people uneasy. How can we dare to take it away from everyone?

And that’s the Monster Librarian, counting them down. America’s Top Ten Banned Books. Now go find a copy of one and read it! And find a second one, and give it to a teen or child who otherwise might miss out on some really good reads. Or at least some quality potty humor.

 

 

 

 

Posted on September 23, 2013 by , Reply

Murder Most Foul: Violent Death in Children’s Literature

The Boston Globe just published an interview with Michelle Ann Abate, a professor at Ohio State University who has just published a book about the tradition of murder and violence in children’s literature (a really interesting take on the “scaring the children” theme). I’m not sure if it’s because of the way the interviewer edited the interview for publication, but for some reason both he and she come across as seeming surprised that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature, and she’s actually quoted as saying that “the story of violence and books for young readers hasn’t been told before”.

I have to say that I am surprised at the surprise that there is a tradition of violence in children’s literature. It’s a frequent reason that books are banned (although racism, explicit sexual situations, and profanity currently top that). Going back in history, even after you progress past Grimm’s fairy tales, there’s no lack of violence and death. Andersen’s tales often end with death. “The Little Match Girl”, for instance, freezes to death on the street.

 

Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffman, is a classic children’s book, with lovely illustrations. Here’s one for a story about a girl with matches who burns to death!

 

 

And let’s not forget the Gashlycrumb Tinies.  Poor Kate! Childhood used to be a much different creature than it is today, a point that Abate does make, and attitudes toward parenting tended toward the didactic and scaring kids into behaving. It is interesting to note, though, that Hoffman wrote the book to entertain his young child, and in spite of the terrifying stories and illustrations, there are a lot of adults who remember it as being funny when they were kids.  There’s a darkness inside children that a lot of grownups don’t want to admit is there.

“K is for Kate who was struck with an axe”

Moving on to more recent times, we have the parents of the kids in  Julian Thompson’s The Grounding of Group 6, who send their kids to a school that guarantees they’ll be permanently lost in the woods; the viciousness of the children in William Sleator’s House of Stairs; the matter-of-fact euthanasia of children and the elderly in Lois Lowry’s The Giver;  the government approved murders of “extra” children in Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Among the Hidden; the chilling account of the Holocaust in The Devil’s Arithmetic;  the supernatural terrors from Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark; the death of Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Death, and especially murder, can be scary in books, but nowhere near as scary as daily life. Processing the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a lot more difficult for my kids than processing The Tailypo. 

Many people– librarians, critics, parents, academics– have considered the story of violence in children’s books. Nearly every year there’s at least one article about how children’s literature has gotten too dark. I would say that it’s an aspect that people either choose to avoid (it’s not difficult to avoid children’s books containing murders) or take for granted. When something like The Hunger Games or Goosebumps becomes massively popular, violence in children’s books comes into the spotlight, but even when it’s not in the spotlight, there are people who notice it, study it, and write about it. I think as transmedia platforms become more popular we’ll see more of this come to light, as books and visual media connect in more ways than ever, and this is definitely a topic worth paying attention to… but if the study of violence in children’s literature hasn’t been noticed before, it’s only because people didn’t want to see what was really there.

Posted on August 28, 2013 by , Reply
First « 1234 » Last