Scary Stories For Young Children
“I personally believe that if you are keeping people—young people—safe from the darkness, then, when the darkness shows up, you are denying them tools or weapons that they might have needed and could have had.”
-Neil Gaiman
I have been thinking about what it means to tell a story.
You have characters, action, descriptions, suspense, and (sometimes) resolution.
But what happens to the person who hears the story? How will they repeat the story they have heard? How will it morph with its next presentation? When will it turn into something completely different from what it originally was? What effect will that story have on a new reader or listener?
At about this time, I could easily use the famous Joan Didion quote of “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s a great line and I understand why it remains so quotable. But I prefer this line instead, which happens after that first paragraph in The White Album: “Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.” And in a world of misinformation in which the term “fake news” is consistently thrown around, it is easy to feel the trepidation of the stories we know and retell.
In Christian McKay Heidicker’s Scary Stories for Young Foxes and the sequel The City, the role of stories plays a vital part to these characters. When the stories are twisted to serve a different narrative, the manner in which the characters survive is now a gateway to more danger, a way of losing oneself to darkness.
Scary Stories for Young Foxes begins on a chilly autumn night. Seven fox kits want a story from their mother, specifically a scary story. The mother, having no other new and scary stories for her children, hints that the kits should not visit Bog Cavern where they may hear a story “…so frightening it will put the white in your tail.” The kits, ready for a juicy, meaty, and horrifying story, sneak out to find this tale of terror.
At Bog Cavern, the kits find an old creature - “a pile of bones and skin” - who awakens and taunts the kits that they are not ready for the horror in their stories. And just like human children, the kits are defiant, ready for whatever the creature will describe. Before they begin, the creature, or the storyteller, gives this warning:
“All scary stories have two sides,” the storyteller said. “Like the bright and dark of the moon. If you’re brave enough to listen and wise enough to stay to the end, the stories can shine a light on the good in the world. They can guide your muzzles. They can help you survive.”
“But,” the storyteller said, “if you don’t listen closely…if you turn tail from the horror and don’t stay till the end, then the darkness of the story can swallow all hope. It can frighten you so deeply you’ll never want to leave your den again. You’ll waste away the days with your mother, forever smelling like her milk.”
The kits, facing shame and scorn amongst themselves if they fail to listen to the story, summon up their courage, sit in front of the storyteller, and listen to what happens next. From this point the story shifts to the perspective of two other foxes, Mia and Uly, whose stories start independent of each other and later merge to an explosive ending. Throughout the telling of this story some of the fox kits find the story either too silly or too horrific and leave the storyteller’s cavern to return back to their den. Those who stay are treated with a true tale of horror and beautiful resolution.
Mia’s and Uly’s stories come into play in Heidicker’s sequel, Scary Stories for Young Foxes: The City. The stories of Mia and Uly’s adventures have turned into folk tales that foxes tell each other during their days on the Farm, living separately in their wire dens. Originally, Mia escaped a human (Beatrix Potter the taxidermist) after helping her mother escape a trap. This story has now been twisted into how Mia stayed with this human as a means to be safe away from all the dangers in the forest. The stories of Mia and Uly had morphed to justify why the foxes stay in wire cages, waiting for the time for when they enter the Barn where they will be reunited with their ancestors, never realizing the true nature of the Farm or the intentions of the Farmer. The stories that had been passed down from generation to generation as a way to provide context and warning of the dangers of the forest have now been perverted to ensnare foxes to their doom.
Heidicker is a patient author. He allows his books to expand enough that the reader is hooked, slowly but steadily preparing the reader for a ferocious ending. Similar to Richard Adams’s Watership Down, Heidicker provides realistic attributes to his animal characters. Heidicker’s foxes kill and eat like regular foxes. He does not sugarcoat that the creatures of the forest do what they must to survive and that said creatures have their own cultural standards and language.
For children who read these horrific tales, it is an opportunity to explore what it means to tell a story, what it means to hear a story. It is also a way to explore what happens when we mute or edit a story for young children. What does it mean to censor a story when it could be holding a child back from a learning opportunity? Why is there the mentality that we must protect children from horror when it’s the thing that can help them survive? Children are very observant. They absorb and collect experiences quickly. If you do not provide context or engage in conversation with a child, they will create their own stories, their own interpretation of events that can have a lasting effect - both positively and negatively.
In his 2020 Newbery Honor speech for Scary Stories for Young Foxes, Christian McKay Heidicker discussed resilience and why we tell spooky stories:
“We tell ghost stories to help deal with our past. We tell vampire stories to keep ourselves and our loved ones from being seduced into darkness And we tell zombie stories to prepare ourselves from pandemics but more importantly to know what to do when you can no longer recognize your neighbor or a figure you are meant to trust has become a threat.”
It’s been a rough few years. It’s been nasty, cold, and indifferent. Even in the midst of stories of triumph, there has been devastation and we will be dealing with the mental and physical ramification for years to come. Reading scary stories allows us to question our own stories and interpretations. If I was living this tale, what would I do? How would I survive? Horror is a way to explore the terror of our world without having to live out the actual situation. We owe it to children to not mute the terror. We owe it to ourselves to not mute our own darkness and share that with the world. Yes, we tell stories in order to survive but to also learn, grow, and thrive.
Christian McKay Heidicker’s Newbery Honor Acceptance Speech
Photo credit: Junyi Wu
https://read.macmillan.com/lp/scarystoriesforyoungfoxes/