scary stories | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Summer Reading Is Killing Me!

As the end of school nears (well, here it’s actually over) stories about summer reading loss and editorials in favor of a year round calendar start to make an appearance. Politics aside, research really does show that kids who don’t read over summer break actually backslide in their reading ability and skills. Enter the required summer reading list.

Here are a couple of books that appear on the the local high school’s reading list for kids going into their sophomore year of high school.

Night by Elie Wiesel
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez
I Am The Cheese by Robert Cormier

Are these really books teens should read on their own? I’m not saying that tenth graders are unable to read the words, but the content is pretty disturbing. To be fair, the list also includes Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and students are required to read only one of the books on the list (there are about 20), while they can choose the other. But still. Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide, discusses the problem of assigning a book like Night in his book- it’s a powerful book, but not a book I’d call recreational reading. I might be wrong, but I don’t think it’s likely to inspire recreational reading, either.

But there ARE a lot of great resources for encouraging summer reading. Your local library probably has a summer reading program (ours does- in fact, it has separate programs for kids, YA’s and adults), and if you or your kids aren’t intrinsically motivated to pick up a book and read, go sign up and you’ll usually get prizes for reading- free food, books, and so on. Generally the library has lists of books for different age ranges that can get you started.Don’t be scared to ask the librarian (a surprising number of people are).

There are also some fun websites with reading recommendations for kids and teens. I’ll just mention a few.Believe me, there are many!

Jon Scieszka, author of many awesome books for kids, has a great program called Guys Read, aimed at, well, getting guys to read. I love the categories of books on the site! You can’t not, with topics like “At least one explosion” and “Mysterious Occurences” stored in their vault. As a bonus, right on the home page, if you scroll down and look under “Let’s Get To The Books”, there is a list of “scary stories”. Guys Read actually promotes scary stories for kids! Go there, check it out, and then check some of those books out of your library.
James Patterson also sponsors a website intended to promote reading called ReadKiddoRead. While some of the booklists are outdated, the current reviews are great, and the site is geared toward creating an online community supportive of getting all kinds of kids reading. I’d say this one is aimed much more at parents and educators than Guys Read is, but it’s another resource with suggestions for all kinds of reads.
Finally, some good lists for summer reading choices for teens can be found through YALSA, the American Library Association’s division for young adult library services, particularly their “Best of the Best”.

Oh my gosh, it’s a flood of books! Kelly Gallagher would be proud. Pick a couple and read them on your own, or together with your kids, your family, your friends… Just do it. And have a great summer.

Moms vs. Zombies, Mother’s Day Edition: Mother May I?

Welcome to the final entry in our Mother’s Day lineup. Today our zombie editor, Michele Lee, shares with us her thoughts about building a culture of reading and writing when you’re a horror-loving mom.

Michele Lee is the author of Rot and mother of budding writer Rose Lee. She is also a book reviewer in addition to her role as zombie editor for MonsterLibrarian.com.

Mother May I?

By Michele Lee

As if it’s not bad enough that we parent these days in the spotlight of public scrutiny, there comes a point where you hear the dreaded words “You read what?”

It’s hard to avoid zombies, werewolves, vampires and ghouls these days. The kids even have their own versions, the Poison Apple books from Scholastic, Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie by David Lubar, The Zombie Chasers, Zombiekins, and. of course, Zombie Butts from Uranus by Andy Griffiths. This isn’t a new thing. In my younger days we had There’s a Batwing in my Lunchbox by Ann Hodgman, Bunnicula by James Howe and The Little Vampire.

We grew up with it. While those a generation older than us teethed on Stephen King, we blossomed from elementary monsters to R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike and Richie Tankersley Cusick. Don’t forget that L.J. Smith and her Vampire Diaries were ours first. On our side of things we wonder how the Jason and Freddy-loving teens became the same parents who sneer at our zombie T-shirts and look at us with suspicion when they see us reading the latest Brian Keene in front of our kids.

As parents, we’ve already been there, wondering where’s the limit for our adorable little spawn. Of course we don’t let them watch a Saw marathon. We don’t read Laurell K. Hamilton to them before bed every night either. But the nature of kids is to idolize us adults (which is at once one of the most awesome, and scariest parts of being a parent) so of course, things bleed.

Two years ago now (almost to the day) while I was editing Rot for its launch, my daughter decided she was going to write a zombie story too. She even asked me how to spell zombie, so she could write it on her to do list (and you better believe I have pictures of that in her scrapbook). Rot is not in any way at all appropriate for a kid to read, and I’d been very careful not to let her hear me reading it out loud. But she knew, and had seen the illustrations, and she wanted to write a zombie book too.

What came out was a most excellent story, that I promptly paid her a dollar to let me publish on my blog (because money flows to the writer). Enthusiastic, she pitched me a sequel (with evil ballerinas!). Write it, I said. And she lost interest. She was five.

Does she still know about zombies and vampires and what kind of things I write? Sure. She can grab the books my work is in, stare down the occasional meat puppet on the cover and wave it at me, exclaiming “This is your book, Mom.” But she doesn’t see terrifying tales of torture and sickness and blood-curdling terror. They’re things Mom has done that we all should be proud of, like her spelling tests and her brother’s artwork.

Kids get scared, but they are not adults and they do not think the same way. Scary and gross to kids are snot monsters that swallow hamsters (who are later saved by people wearing underwear and capes). Scary is something the world teaches them.

My daughter, accidentally one night, saw most of Repo: the Genetic Opera. She woke up in the middle of the night, and I was watching it and didn’t see her sitting in the doorway, fascinated. Ask her what it’s about and she’ll say there’s a pretty, blind woman who sings songs and tries to help a girl who finds out her dad is a bad guy. It’s not the blood, the repossessing of organs, the corporate greed, the hedonism or the addiction that scares her. And the bit where Paris Hilton’s face falls off? That’s just silly. Really, she doesn’t think the movie is that scary at all, just sad. The bit that resonated with her was the girl holding on to her dad crying because he wasn’t what she thought he was.

When kids are scared, it’s personal. Generally, they aren’t scared of monsters and blood, they’re scared of mom and dad abandoning them, or letting people down themselves. You know how kids always assume if something bad happens then they must have done something wrong? They aren’t scared of the same things we are because they haven’t connected with the real scary things in the outside world. My daughter wasn’t scared about 9/11 because she had no clue what it was, but I don’t know an adult who wasn’t.

When you’re a horror-loving parent, the wicked, inhuman beasties remind your kids of you, a person they trust and love. I don’t advocate having a popcorn and showing-of-Chucky night for family time, but if your kids want their own scary stories, how is sharing time, and a small piece of something you love with them, so wrong?

Besides, they need to be prepared for the zombie apocalypse too, right?