Author Christopher Edge argues that scary stories can be good for children.
Image: Mathias Ball
Christopher Edge
There is only one emotion that is as old as life on Earth – and that emotion is fear. A primal reaction that has evolved to help protect every living thing against any perceived threats or dangers. But the dangers we face are constantly evolving, and so are our fears.
Horror fiction is the genre where authors present fear to us as entertainment, and it can sometimes be viewed by some as a malign or dangerous influence, especially on impressionable young minds.
However, at a time when news reports and surveys show a frightening decline in reading for pleasure amongst young people, I think age-appropriate horror fiction has an important role to play in bringing children, who are at risk of turning away from reading, back to the world of books by showing them, with a frisson of fear, the excitement that can be found in a great scary story.
The popularity of scary stories
When all your other recommendations fail, often these reluctant readers will enjoy ‘scary’ books.
Polly Peck, American children’s book expert
This is an observation I’ve had affirmed in countless conversations with school librarians who point to horror books by brilliant authors such as Jennifer Killick, Phil Hickes, and Derek Landy, as well as books in the phenomenally successful Goosebumps series, as being the ones that have ignited a child’s interest in reading.
When I was growing up in the 1980s, my first encounter with horror was discovering a Stephen King novel on my older brother’s bookshelf at far too young an age, while spooky public information films about the dangers of railway lines and reservoirs left a deep and lasting impression on an entire generation!
Nowadays, children’s first encounters with this genre can often take place in online contexts – for example, user-generated horror content such as creepypasta, where legends of invented paranormal entities are shared on message boards and social media, or in scary haunted TikTok videos. But this content is often inappropriate for children.
Providing a safe space to explore horror themes
With my new series, Fear Files, I want to give young readers immersive page-turning stories that will send shivers down their spine but also provide them with a safe space to explore age-appropriate horror tropes and themes, like ghosts and cursed objects, paranormal entities, and weird anomalies.
Each Fear File is a stand-alone story taken from the Darkive, a top-secret database of the strange and unexplained, and is presented alongside evidence in the form of case notes, Wikipedia entries, screenshots, drawings and more. These books are custom-built for young readers, empowering them to face their fears and confront things that initially scare them.
So often there’s a temptation to protect children from things that scare them, but this only disempowers them. A recent psychological study found that when children were told a frightening story, they voluntarily re-exposed themselves to the same story again and again.
Children use scary stories as a way to identify and master their fears – a crucial stage in child development – equipping them to deal with the real world.
I think the following quote from the celebrated children’s author C. S. Lewis illustrates this best:
Those who say children must not be frightened would feed them on escapism in the bad sense. Nothing will persuade me that [a frightening story] causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.
C. S. Lewis, Author
Now the first book in the Fear Files series is Hide and Seek, a story inspired by the childhood game of hide and seek, which is genuinely the most terrifying game ever invented. Terrifying for the hider: are you going to get caught – or worse, forgotten? Terrifying for the seeker – who or what is going to jump out at you when you go looking for them?
In Fear Files: Hide and Seek, Adam and his best friend, Sol, discover an abandoned ghost town and find themselves playing a strange game of hide and seek. But who or what is trying to find them? And can Adam stay one step ahead?
I hope you’ll feel a little frightened as you turn the pages of Fear Files: Hide and Seek. And don’t forget to keep an eye out for the Itter…
Fear Files: Hide and Seek by Christopher Edge is out now.
With witness accounts being supplemented by interviewer notes and illustrations, this first instalment in a middle-grade horror series is based on the Darkive: a secret database filled with recovered testimony from survivors of terrifying and/or inexplicable phenomena.
