Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

In fiction, setting—the time and place where a narrative unfolds—anchors a story in an all-important grounding of logic, verisimilitude, and atmosphere, giving its imaginary events a basic believability and emotional power. In a horror story, the setting plays a particularly crucial role since the events are largely illogical and unnatural: The story’s backdrop must prepare the listener/reader for the supernatural (or otherwise disorienting) events to come, often by creating a mood of isolation, danger, or the uncanny. For instance, horror stories tend to strand their protagonists, usually alone, in dark, menacing places far from home: abandoned houses, nocturnal forests, misty paths, old graveyards, and lonely highways. From the start, these settings weave an atmosphere of loneliness, vulnerability, and dread, so when the horrific or supernatural elements of the tale come into play, they appear almost logical to the reader. The isolated setting also intensifies the terror: Cut off from all help and perhaps doubting their rational state of mind, the lone protagonist has little or no avenue of retreat or reassurance. Most of the tales in Scary Stories feature backdrops like this—dark, lonely settings familiar to the reader from other spooky stories—serving as spine-tingling variations on a well-known theme.

In “What Do You Come For?,” “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!,” “The Haunted House,” and “Wait Till Martin Comes,” a lone character enters an old, abandoned house, typically at night, priming the listener for eerie, if not macabre, goings-on. In all of these stories, the atmosphere of dread thickens with each passing minute as grisly sights and sounds mount up, e.g., decaying body parts falling, one by one, into a fireplace and then forming a body; a chimney reverberating with an eerie refrain, sung by a severed head that suddenly drops onto the hearth; footsteps in the cellar, followed by gasping and thrashing noises and finally a ghost with a skeletal face treading slowly up the stairs; and eerie, watchful cats gathering one by one in a room, each bigger than the last, talking menacingly. In all, the slow burn of the nightmarish events flows (super)naturally from the dank, foreboding setting of the haunted house. Similarly, the boy in “The Big Toe” is trapped horribly alone in his dark bedroom when the spectral menace comes for him, creeping slowly through the house, and the girl in “The Girl Who Stood on a Grave” has no companion to tell her that she has simply pinned her skirt to the grave in the dark. In “The Walk” and “High Beams,” a dark forest path and a road at night, respectively, become settings for lonely terror, and in “The Babysitter,” the spookiness of sitting up late in a strange house is heightened by the presence of vulnerable children. In all these stories, as well as in “Room for One More,” “The Hook,” “The Attic,” and “The Ghost With the Bloody Fingers,” the threat of entrapment in a confined space (whether a house, a forest, an elevator, or a car) provides much of the atmosphere and creeping terror.

Additionally, many of the stories are set in a previous era, before telephones or emergency services, deepening the sense of vulnerability and isolation. “Cold as Clay,” “A New Horse,” “The White Wolf,” “The Wendigo,” and “The Haunted House,” some of which are based on old folktales, all seem to unfold in a previous century before the advent of modern, civilized life and the aura of safety and rationality it provides. Moreover, many of the protagonists and other characters seem to be farmers or hunters, implying the isolation of farmlands or rural areas far from the hubs of civilization. As Sherlock Holmes observes in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” “[L]look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields […] Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser” (Doyle, Arthur Conan. “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.” Strand Magazine, June 1892). In many of his stories, Alvin Schwartz exemplifies the use of setting to tighten the screws of horror by removing (or diminishing) the comforts of sunlight, companionship, the rationality of modern life, and the hope of rescue or escape.