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Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark is a series of three children's books written by Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell. The scary stories of the title are pieces of folklore collected and adapted by Schwartz. Their titles are Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark, More Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark, and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. The first volume was published in 1986, and the books have subsequently been collected in both a box set and a single volume.

Content

The tales are a mix of traditional ghost stories and more modern urban myths. The subject matter ranges from haunted house and graveyard tales to stories of the vanishing hitchhiker. Many of the contemporary tales center on the theme of dangerous and frightening urban environments, like cities and universities. Each book is also notable for including a selection of humorous ghost stories in the last chapter as well as a selection of songs.

Beyond the stories themselves, the books have two notable features: exhaustively researched and annotated notes and sources sections, and disturbing and evocative illustrations by Gammell.

The art features a variety of gruesome subjects, including corpses, mutilations, and hideous creatures, almost all of which are distinctly unnerving. Most illustrations include surreal or grotesque elements, most notably in the second volume’s “The Trouble” which features a two page abstract illustration symbolizing the bizarre nature of the story. Even relatively mundane illustrations, such as “The Baby Sitter” from the first volume have a disturbing and off center quality.

Controversy

The sinister nature of the illustrations and the frightening subject matter in the series caused it to be repeatedly challenged for inclusion in libraries throughout the 1990s. It eventually topped the list of challenged books of the 1990s by the American Library Association [1].

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