Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, a 1981 collection of horror tales for young readers by Alvin Schwartz, draws from a rich assortment of oft-told spooky stories and verse, including “jump stories,” ghost stories, urban legends, macabre songs and poems, and stories that blend horror with humor. Schwartz’s crisp retellings of these stories, some hundreds of years old, examine themes of death and decay, body horror, revenge, suburban unease, ghost lore, witchcraft, and dark humor. Scary Stories and its two follow-ups, More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1984) and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones (1991), all illustrated by Stephen Gammell, have sold millions of copies and are now regarded as classics of the horror genre. Gammell’s grisly black-and-white illustrations have also become famous (or infamous) in their own right: A recent attempt by HarperCollins to replace Gammell’s work with more child-friendly illustrations in a new edition was soon reversed after backlash from the books’ fans, young and old. In 2019, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark was adapted into a successful motion picture co-written and produced by acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.

This guide refers to the 2017 HarperCollins paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide discuss death, corpses, and body horror and mutilation.

Summary

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark includes retellings of 29 horror stories, some of them very old. The collection includes various types of tales, including jump stories, ghost stories, macabre poems and songs, tales about magical transformations, urban legends dealing with real-life dangers, and works of morbid humor. All of them, especially the jump stories, are meant by the author to be read aloud. Stephen Gammell’s ghoulish illustrations accompany the tales.

The book’s first section, which deals with jump scares, provides cues for reading the stories aloud, i.e., parenthetical prompts for the reader to stamp their foot or “jump” at a listener while screaming or shouting the climactic line. “The Big Toe,” a variation of an old tale about a person who steals a body part and is visited at night by its ghostly owner, ends with a cue for the storyteller to jump accusingly at one of the listeners and shout, “YOU’VE GOT IT!” (9). Similarly, “The Walk,” about two pedestrians on a lonesome path who become leery of each other, ends with a broken sentence and a sudden scream. “What Do You Come For?” features a haunted house and severed body parts falling down a chimney, ending with the reader stamping their foot and screaming, “I come—for YOU!” (12). Likewise, “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!,” also featuring a haunted chimney, ends with a long scream that seems to spell doom for the protagonist. “A Man Who Lived in Leeds,” the collection’s first poem, is a bit of nonsense verse that rises to a bloody climax and a “jump.” “Old Woman All Skin and Bone” is a song that describes a festering corpse and climaxes just like the previous poem, with an “AAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

The book’s second part deals largely with ghosts, though the first story, “The Thing,” features a “wraith,” a spectral prophecy of how the living protagonist will look in death. “Cold as Clay,” a traditional ghost story about a dead lover’s return from the grave, stresses eeriness over gore, but “The White Wolf,” a revenge tale, ends with the hunter protagonist’s grisly death at the hands (or rather teeth) of a ghostly predator. “The Haunted House,” another macabre story of revenge, concerns a preacher who helps a “haunt” reveal the guilt of the man who murdered her. For a change of pace, “The Guests” offers a scene of cozy hospitality that only becomes blood-chilling in retrospect once the guests of the title find out who their hosts really were.

The third section of the book samples a wide variety of spooky stories, beginning with “The Hearse Song,” a gross-out ditty similar to “Old Woman All Skin and Bone,” minutely describing the putrefaction that awaits all humans after death. “The Girl Who Stood on a Grave,” like some of the urban legends in the next section, features no supernatural events and has often (traditionally) been told as a “true” story. “A New Horse,” featuring a witch, represents the first of the book’s two transformation stories—in this one, three people are magically changed into horses; in “Alligators,” a father and his two sons, all avid swimmers, metamorphose into the title animals. “Room for One More,” somewhat similarly to “The Thing,” features a prophetic vision of death but one that serves as a timely warning for the protagonist. “The Wendigo,” adapted from a 1910 story by Algernon Blackwood—derived, in turn, from an Indigenous American legend—features a murderous demon that comes with the rising storm. The macabre semi-poem “The Dead Man’s Brains,” a component of a popular party game, substitutes slimy foodstuffs, in the dark, for human body parts. “May I Carry Your Basket,” similar to “What Do You Come For?” and “Me Tie Dough-ty Walker!,” imagines a violent encounter with a sentient severed head.

The stories in the book’s fourth part are all urban legends that have, at one time or another, been passed around by word of mouth as true events. “The Hook,” an example of the “narrow escape” genre of “true” scares, describes a young couple’s near ambush by a hook-handed killer. “The White Evening Gown,” featuring a poisoned dress, warns readers not to trust (even beautiful) things of uncertain provenance, while “High Beams,” with its twist ending, likewise hints that things are often not as they seem—sometimes, a seeming menace can actually be a savior. “The Babysitter,” an old chestnut of suburban unease, reprises the narrow escape of “The Hook,” now fraught with the pitfalls of modern telecommunication.

The fifth and final section ends the book on a comic note. The twist ending of “The Viper” suggests that creepy phone calls (like the ones in “The Babysitter”) can sometimes be perfectly benign, while “The Attic” ambushes the reader, who has been led to expect a haunted house story, with a different sort of jump ending. The humorous poem “The Slithery-Dee” ends with what might be called a “slurp scare,” and the postmortem antics of “Aaron Kelly’s Bones,” about a dancing cadaver, are both funny and scary at once. Likewise, “Wait Till Martin Comes,” featuring talking cats, strikes notes both eerie and ridiculous. Lastly, “The Ghost With the Bloody Fingers,” a haunted house story that ends abruptly with a puckish one-liner, hints at the fine line between supernatural terror and slapstick farce.