Horror for Young People

When I was in grade school, I was a fan of Urban Legend books, of true crime stories, and of those ghost story anthologies aimed at, say, 8 to 10 year olds—Alvin Schwartz’s books are a good example of the genre (and I notice they are also on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books List of 1990-2000.)

I can’t recall if Schwartz’s books were strictly fiction or if they were marketed as “True Ghost Stories.” I read more than one of the "true" ghost story type, running into the same eight or nine ghosts that could be "proved" somehow, e.g. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, whose name is imprinted in my brain forever because of seeing that same photograph a dozen times in different scary books.

I was too old to have much interest in R.L. Stine—his Goosebumps books got hugely popular when I was already reading Stephen King and Dean Koontz and similar popular adult horror novelists' works. I did read a few of his teen-oriented Fear Street books, but even they seemed "young" for me before I started high school. I couldn't name a single title or storyline from book in the series now. In grades seven and eight I was reading other one-off young adult titles by a variety of authors, usually the ones issued with similar cover templates by Scholastic, circa the late 1980s. (This page on Amazon shows the kind of cover I remember, but if you try the “Closer Look” option, it reverts to the more recently issued covers.) The design decision was a smart move on Scholastic’s part, because I was always willing to give a book with that kind of cover a shot, even though I knew nothing of the author or plot.

I’ve forgotten most of those books, with the exception of the Christina series by Caroline B. Cooney, which were very oddly written compared to most of the teen horror books circulating around that time—Cooney was working hard to develop atmosphere and a specific setting in detail (coastal Maine), and the books include some passages that were practically experimental writing, to the eyes of a twelve-year old. I do also remember the book Prom Dress by Lael Littke, which is, of course, about a cursed prom dress. Even on my first reading of that one, the premise didn’t strike me as all that terrifying—it’s a dress, not a vampire. Put it in a bonfire if you really think it’s cursed. Job done. I recall that book mainly because one scene involves a badly injured girl, still in the (cursed) dress, arriving at the hospital, whereupon a nurse—a grown woman—is so overcome with the (cursed) beauty of the dress that she takes care not to cut it off the injured girl. Then she steals it. There’s a lot of dress-stealing in that book.