Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Collected from American Folklore
Paperback
(J.P. Lippincott Oct. 1, 1981)
Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark opens with a legend similar to my scar-inducing "Tailypo," "The Big Toe." Less sinister than severing a woodland creature's tail, in Schwartz’s version, a little boy innocently uncovers a large toe sticking up in the garden. Not exploring further, he wrenches it from the ground (or a corpse) and gives it to his mother to cook, as one does. After dinner and settling into bed for sleep and digesting, a voice stalks the house, calling out for its missing toe. Whether zombie or ghost we can’t be sure, as some versions end with the storyteller pouncing on a listener, and others with a figure in the chimney who returns the favor of having its toe consumed by eating the little boy. This is the perfect opening for a book set to scar children for life, because what is scarier than the idea of being devoured? Children know they won't stay children forever, that the ever-looming threat of adulthood stands in the shadows, ready to devour playtime and naps. To a child, play is synonymous with the self, and therefore maturity threatens to consume that self. Don't even have a taste of that toe, kids - once adulthood knows you're there, it will come knocking, forks drawn. As a child, I feared being devoured literally thanks to Tailypo and the grandma-eating Big Bad Wolf. As I got older this fear evolved into a biologically absurd terror at sharks that (I believed) swam in the freshwater lakes where my family would water-ski. In high school, my Asian Studies teacher gave a lecture on the film Jaws and the great white as metaphor for our own terror at things deep (and buried – like a corpse!) in our psyche rising up from the darkness to consume us, transforming us into the monsters we know we’re capable of being, (the fact that the shark was a great white shark devouring victims is a post for another day). At 17, this lecture blew my mind and resparked my interest in horror,
- ISBN
- 0397319703 / 9780397319701
- Weight
- 9.0 oz.
- Dimensions
- 8.8 x 5.9 in.
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