Nashville Book Club

Have you seen this horrifying news? The classic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark that we read as children has become so terrifying, so grotesque and scary and monstrous, that I am scared to buy them for my own daughter, as I had planned on doing in a couple of years. No, they’re not gorier. They’re not grislier, or scarier stories, or even more subtly chilling. Instead, they have new watered-down art that will render them unreadable.

Gone are the bone-chilling illustrations that we knew as children, with the screaming skeletons and blood-dripping creatures and other nightmare-inducing artwork; in their place are these round, Disney-fied joke characters who wouldn’t inspire nuns to have nightmares. Seriously? This is horror?

Schwartz’s masterpiece was an enormous chunk from my childhood—something that inspired not just nightmares and even daytime fears, but my own scary writing. It was a pioneer piece of horror that got all of the kids talking and whispering in hushed, scared voices—much like Harry Potter after it—and it wasn’t just the stories that did it.

Flipping through books was key in checking them out at that age, and once you flipped through Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, you couldn’t very well put it down. How would you know what happened to the skeletal bride that way? The art was absolutely gripping, something that wouldn’t let you turn away.

And now it’s being cartoon-ified.

You know what? If you want to focus on cleaning up children’s media to make it less scary, let’s start with the Toy Story 3 and Cars 2 and other shows that actually depict torture, death, and other scariness. These violent sequences are much worse than the artwork being edited out of our beloved stories—and these stories aren’t even aimed at the young audiences that these films cater to! They are available in the fifth and sixth grade libraries (at least, in my own experience) and can easily be monitored by parents. They’re also not live action, which has to give them less impact.

I would like to vehemently oppose the changing of these excellent books and that future generations not be gifted with watered down versions of Scary Stories. It’s a useless action when you can, as a parent, simply ask that the stories be read at a later age (not to mention that the stories themselves are just as scary; are they not being edited, too?). There are worse boogeymen in your children’s lives, believe me.

If you are looking for a great book to review in your book club, might I suggest Life’s Little Instruction Book by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.? I know it’s an oldie—published in Nashville ten years ago—but it’s a goodie, and it’s one of the top books I would recommend for people to read.

The book is filled with little one-liners like, “Respect teachers,” and “Don’t waste time learning tricks of the trade. Learn the trade.” Some are quite obvious, while others make a light bulb go off over your head. The book was out before the big self-help rage that began more recently, so its material is more fresh and honest rather than the quick sell we’ve come to expect.

I don’t recommend this book for the same reason that many other people do—because they think the wisdom within it is so important and unique that every human being must experience it and incorporate it into their lives somehow. The thing is, this is true for a few gems you will find in the book. But the real reason why I like to recommend it is the same one an honors college professor gave to me when he recommended it—so I could further build upon my critical thinking capacity.

He wanted me to evaluate the instructions and choose ten that I really felt were good and to explain why. He also wanted me to select another ten and explain why I thought they were a load of crap. Another ten, he said, should be items I thought were partly true, and that would be true if modified a certain way; I was to modify them and explain why. Finally, he wanted me to create ten of my own.

How I wish I could remember the ten little instructions I made on my own! Knowing my feminist roots, I am sure one HAD to have been about the menstrual cycle… All joking aside, this is a fantastic way to evaluate the written word, but also the world itself. You can learn quite a bit about yourself when you do this, and I bet if I did it again and had my original paper to compare my new lists with, it would be quite different.

My own copy of the book has been passed around family members over the years, with some items underlined, others crossed out; we have many margin notes including a few of our own perspectives, too. My dream when purchasing the book as a young adult was to pass it around and glean wisdom from my elders, and then to add my own thoughts when I was older to share with my own children. If you can get a copy of this book—or the others in its series—and wish to do the same, I would be honored in your sharing of my tradition.