Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

Alvin SchwartzFiction | Short Story Collection | Middle Grade | Published in 1981

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Worms

A disturbingly animate symptom of death and decay, worms figure abundantly in Scary Stories, usually slithering in and out of a corpse. The undulating rhythms and rhymes of “The Hearse Song”—“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, / The worms play pinochle on your snout” (39)—mimic the oozing pullulation of maggots in a dead body. The paradox of lively (and disgusting) activity within the eternal stillness of death gives this morbid motif a uniquely upsetting quality. Likewise, the song “Old Woman All Skin and Bone” uses almost the same words and cadence, adding, “You’ll look like that when you’re dead!” (18). Much of the humorous, gross-out allure of these songs is the gruesome fact that they describe the inevitable fate of our bodies, one that “The Hearse Song” rubs in our faces: “They eat your eyes, they eat your nose” (39). Maggots slowly devouring our flesh while we are powerless to prevent it describes not superstition but natural law, which is perhaps why it must be laughed at. “The Dead Man’s Brains” even invites listeners to squish between their fingers the slimy worms “that ate the rest of him” in the form of wet spaghetti (55). This visceral reckoning with one of the grimmest aspects of mortality gives maggots and decay an absurd, almost cartoonish quality, making death itself seem less fearsome.

Animals

In Scary Stories, animals figure as eerie harbingers of the presence of the supernatural. For instance, in “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker,” one of the book’s haunted house stories, a boy’s dog falls under the influence of a ghost, after which it repeatedly sings a nonsense verse—“Lynchee kinchy colly molly dingo dingo!” (15)—in concert with the ghost’s equally inane song. As the ghost descends the chimney, the dog sings its maddening chorus louder and louder, finally dying of terror. In “Cold as Clay,” the “trembling” fear of Jim’s horse hints that its rider is not all that he seems; in actuality, Jim is a dead man, returning to teach his girlfriend’s father a lesson. In “A New Horse,” horses themselves are not quite what they seem: An old witch has enchanted young farmhands with a magical harness, changing them into steeds to carry her on trips. Likewise, in “Alligators,” a woman’s sons and husband vanish after a long night of swimming, apparently transmogrified into the titular animals. In “The Attic,” the protagonist’s dog vanishes without a trace, perhaps signifying the presence of evil in the house.

In some of the stories, on the other hand, animals themselves are supernatural entities, possibly ghosts or demons in animal guise. In “The White Wolf,” the titular creature cannot be harmed by hunters’ bullets and slays a notorious wolf killer without leaving tracks. In “Wait Till Martin Comes,” a series of sinister talking cats, each one bigger and scarier than the last, menace an old man in a creepy house. The inscrutability of animals and humans’ instinctive leeriness of them makes them ideal vessels of the supernatural; even the dog in “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!,” the boy’s trusted companion whom he brought for protection, is susceptible to an evil influence. In Scary Stories, animals inhabit a sinister liminal space between the rational human world and the savage, mysterious realm of the uncanny.

Mutilation and Body Horror

The loss of bodily integrity, one of the central horrors of Schwartz’s book, can be found in over half the stories. Scary Stories overflows with severed heads, feet, toes, fingers, throats, and limbs, many of which continue to move on their own as if still attached to a living body. In “The Big Toe,” a child digging in a garden yanks out a potato-shaped toe, which he and his family eat for supper, putting the boy at the mercy of the toe’s undead owner. “What Do You Come For?,” “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!,” and “May I Carry Your Basket?” all feature disembodied heads that move on their own, attacking the protagonists. In “Aaron Kelly’s Bones,” the decayed title character literally falls to pieces while his skull continues to dance and sing, and “The Dead Man’s Brains” tabulates the slimy organs of a mutilated corpse, albeit simulated by harmless foodstuffs. These instances of body horror, aside from the goriness of their mutilation and the supernatural terror of their reanimation, touch on the primal fear of losing control of one’s own body or bodily functions: a fate as real and inevitable as death itself. Organs or limbs that move on their own also disturb us on an unconscious level because their movements, familiar yet jarringly unnatural, evoke a nightmarish sense of the uncanny. (The danse macabre of Aaron Kelly is a prime example.) As with the singing dog in “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!,” everyday things breaking out of their usual behaviors or contexts—as if possessed by a malevolent, outside force—twist the familiar and intimate into the unpredictable “other”: in this case, irrational, ungovernable appendages of the macabre.