Many argue the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series’s success was due almost entirely to Gammell’s illustrations. Now a Guillermo del Toro-produced film adaptation is bringing those books to new audiences.ĭon’t you ever laugh as the hearse goes by,įor you may be the next to die. The metatext and Gammell’s disturbing illustrations made Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark a school book fair sensation and one of the most challenged and banned book series in recent American history. The three-book series shared spooky American folklore with younger readers, with Schwartz also teaching them about how to share them and inviting them to have a look at what’s going on under the hood like Campbell and Frazer. Writers like Joseph Campbell and Sir James George Frazer focused their scholarly work on those traditions, tracing the similarities between the stories of gods and monsters as a way to understand the collective psychology of the human race.Īlvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark series belongs in the same conversation as The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Golden Bough, with all of the works focused on telling stories, and what telling stories even means. If that’s true, then the folk tales of our culture - passed around and changed by so many - tell us intimate truths about us. Any work of art illustrates intimate truths about the person who created it. There’s an eerie and fascinating power to stories that are so old that we don’t know whom the muses first whispered them to.
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