scary stories for spooky times
This Week in Reading
Roald Dahl's Book of Ghost Stories
In the past year or so, I have tried to take steps to live a slightly less mediated life. I rely less heavily on Yelp, instead picking restaurants that I like the look of from the sidewalk. I will walk into a movie theater without having seen the trailer, buy a book without reading the back cover. Introducing a grain of spontaneity into a hyper planned life.
For the most part, these experiments result in pleasant surprises, or at least harmless ones. However, going into something completely unprepared is sometimes really baffling. One time I watched Beasts of the Southern Wild and was completely convinced that it was a documentary, until a giant magical boar waded across the screen. I picked up this book because it had a great cover, and because I love Roald Dahl. “Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories,” it read, which seemed pretty self-explanatory. Imagine my dismay when I realized that it was not actually written by Roald Dahl, but was instead simply a collection of stories selected by him.
On the other side of Halloween, I've been thinking a lot about the trappings of scary story. The things that children believe to be scary: vampires and goblins and werewolves. Halloween-scary, which is very different than real-life-scary. Halloween-scary feels removed from genuine fear. I certainly don't want to meet a vampire, but it hard to feel frightened of something so distant from my daily reality.
Here are the things that scared me as a child: the movie Chicken Run, lampreys, the hag in Snow White. Here are the things that scare me now: that Mt. Rainier will erupt and destroy Seattle, that when my parents die I will be all alone, that time is passing by too quickly, that little by little I am becoming a worse person instead of a better one.
When you are a child, it is easy to fear imagined terrors. Now, as an adult, my fears are closer to home. There are so many scary things in this world, I don't need to fabricate a monster to feel the chill of horror. Perhaps children actually fear very little, and have to go to more fanciful lengths to experience terror. Maybe that's not true. Just a theory.
That is not to say I am beyond these more visceral fears. I am an incredibly jumpy person. A fire drill can send me literally airborne; a friendly hello at an unexpected time has been known summon an involuntary shriek. I can see the jump shot coming in the horror movie, but I will scream anyways. But those fears feel superficial, bodily. Many of the things we associate with Halloween-scary are physical manifestations of existential fears. Zombies and vampires are figures of death, werewolves a symbol of the loss of control. The teeth and rotting flesh and sounds give us a physical jolt, but the expression behind the eyes, the part that truly terrifies us, is the glimmer of death we all shrink from.
The stories in this book strike the balance between fantastical scariness, and adult scariness.
In one story a girl vividly describes an imaginary friend, whom she claims is her brother, to the immense distress of her adopted mother. On the first day of school she disappears; her teacher reports that her brother had picked her up. Having your child spirited away by a ghost is scary, but what is scarier is the idea that you don't know who your child is, that it may in fact, not be yours. There is a story where a writer receives threatening notes from someone with the same initials as his main character. Being stalked by an ominous fictional character is upsetting, but what makes it so dreadful is not the frightening letters in the mail, but the idea that we are accountable for our own imaginations, that our thoughts can take on weight and form and a life of their own. In another story, a woman receives a creepy phone call from her husband’s deceased first wife. Messages from the dead are frightening, but they are also a manifestation of a bigger, more terrifying idea: that we will never escape the shadow of our partner's former loves.
So many horror movies and ghost stories revolve around children. Maybe it is because children are so unknowable. Tiny humans with complete thoughts and emotions guided by seemingly incomprehensible logic. They look like tiny adults, but are also strangely unfamiliar. We don't ever truly understand what is going on in a child's brain, and while we often write it off as adorable (How cute! They have imagined a friend for themselves!), it could just as easily be construed as sinister. What if the reason children don't make sense is because they know something we do not, is because they are not actually familiar to us at all?
The book itself was fine. Not for me, but fine. It lacked the dark humor and unexpected whimsy of stories written by Roald Dahl himself. The stories were difficult for me to get into, but it is hard for me to get into anything written before 1950, if I perfectly honest (I have no idea when these stories were written, but they feel old). They aren’t scary, really, if that is what you are looking for. I wish that this had been a book of ghost stories written by Roald Dahl, but that is my own fault for not paying more attention.
Further Reading
Another book that feels right for this time of year:
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is delightful and spooky and strange. It is also very short.