There's something to be said for scary stories, for the feeling of some grim and ghastly tale that you read whilst snug among your blankets.
When I was very young, I was strongly opposed to scary things. In fact, I was downright anti-fear. I didn't read the Goosebumps books or ghost stories, partly because I hated the idea of being scared and partly because I somehow had gotten the idea that it was wrong to read them. Then, of course, I started reading more. And more. And more. And when you're reading pretty much everything you can get your hands on, odds are that eventually you'll pick up something at least mildly disconcerting.
When I was nine years old, I picked up a book in the library by Arthur Conan Doyle. I read Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Speckled Band. Nine years old: my first murder mystery.
Oh, it didn't scare me necessarily, but I didn't love snakes again for a while. Which was unfortunate, seeing as they were nearly as common as lizards and alligators where I grew up. Nine years old is also the age when I was introduced to most of the scary urban legends that somehow survive to this day. I remember that the little girls would sit in the corners of the bleachers during gym and whisper the tales to each other, hoping the teachers wouldn't catch us spreading scary stories. I didn't ask for them to be told, it just sort of happened. And I slowly started to realize that scary stories weren't that scary, or if they were, it was almost-kind of fun to be scared or pretend to be scared.
So, in third grade, halfway under the bleachers, one of my best friends whispered the tale of Bloody Mary. Or, the garbled version she had heard. I thought it was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard.
And yet it was never these modern tales of blood-and-guts that scared me. It grossed me out, but only a little. Then again I also used to read "Eyewitness" books about forensics and mummification when I was a kid.
...I was weird.
I found my first real chill when I made the ill-advised decision to read a graphic-novel adaption of Bram Stoker's infamous classic, Dracula.
(for more Dracula, see some of my earlier posts)
As near as I can remember, I dropped the book with a shriek and did not pick it up again for close to eleven years. Oh yes, all the vampires know. I can hold a grudge!
Then one day my dad brought home a box of books.
They were all abridged and illustrated versions of great classics, such as Mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty and Oliver Twist, and The Last of the Mohicans. Even Moby Dick and The Count of Monte Cristo! My sisters and I practically devoured those books, taking them out of the box and spiriting them away to our room. Some of them, however, stayed in the box, and the box was sent to the garage. I didn't understand why, and to this day I don't remember the actual reasoning behind it. What I do remember is one particular book, lying innocently on the top of the heap, its cover a dark mix of reds and purples. If I peered through the lid, I could just make out the words:
Tales of Mystery and Horror.
Edgar Allan Poe.
My curiosity was piqued.
That night, when everyone else in the house was asleep, I crept out of bed with my flashlight and stole across the house to the garage. Now, let me just clarify for you all that my garage was a creepy, creepy place. The windows were covered, filling it with a sickly, greenish light during the day and terrifying shadows at night. The washer and dryer were out there, and one of them would move sometimes while it was going. The door leading from the kitchen to the garage always had deep shadows above it cast by the one working lightbulb, and my twin and I were convinced that if you didn't slam the door quickly to disperse the shadows, something would emerge. In the middle of the night, if for some reason you went to the kitchen or the garage, you might end up with a minor heart attack when the ice-maker in the refrigerator dropped a chunk of ice, echoing like a gunshot.
Now that you know how unfriendly of a garage I had, you can maybe begin to understand how curious about that book I had to be to willingly go out there at night with nothing but a flashlight.
I flipped quickly through the little book, afraid that I would be caught reading a book I figured I probably wasn't supposed to be reading. After all, it had been left in the garage for a reason, right? I passed over The Raven and The Black Cat (thank goodness I didn't actually read that story until I was closer to thirteen) and came to one in particular.
The Fall of the House of Usher.
So there I was, a little girl of ten or eleven years old, crouched on the cement floor of a hot, dark garage reading an adaption of The Fall of the House of Usher. I stopped at the part where Roderick and the narrator are reading The Haunted Palace (way to self-promote there, Poe) and they begin to hear the creaking groans of a door splintering open, coinciding with the poem. I turned the page to find a lurid illustration of Madeline Usher launching herself through the door at her brother as the door slammed open.
Crack!
Thunder crashed over the house, amplified by the cement of the garage, and I jumped. I dropped that book like it was on fire and ran back to my room, barely remembering to shut the garage door behind me.
I thought for sure that my parents knew what I'd been up to, but it turns out that they never heard about it until I told them last year. They personally thought it was hilarious. I didn't touch that book again for a long time, but then I discovered a love for Poe's poetry, and revisited his works. The man was a master of the macabre! His stories, Berenice, for instance, would begin slowly, barely holding the reader's interest. Then, suddenly, something utterly horrifying right at the very end of the tale, to shock the reader out of their comfortable boredom.
I don't much mind frightening tales anymore.
It can be fun, in a way, to get a little bit of an adrenalin rush from when your imagination and your heart-rate spike when a shadow moves as you read Stoker or Stevenson or Poe, and your mind shrieks, "Ohhh, what was that, what was that, what was that?!" To be fair, though, I wouldn't touch modern horror fiction. Only the classics will do for me, back when it was all implied, and what you didn't see was scarier than what you did see.
But I will admit: I still haven't finished Dracula. Too many "I'm creeped out" breaks.
Who knows? Maybe someday someone will read a Poe-esque short story of my own making, and jump at shadows in the darkness?
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