A Reflection on Reading Scary Stories

 A great scary and suspense story that engages you. The best ones build to that engagement and constantly, throughout the script, build that suspense. The main elements that people are looking for in a scary story are concept, suspense, atmosphere. They have to arouse readers' curiosity and want them to ask for more, make them live and feel the story and what the narrator wants to offer, to escape from reality and enter into the fantasy world. This is what the stories that we had to read: ”The wrong grave” by Kelly Link; ”The heart of another” by Marcus Sedgewick and ”The house and the Locket” by Chris Wooding do. The narrators kept me continually in suspense even since I started to read them, always questioning what will happen, how is the story going to end and sometimes thinking about the difference between fiction and reality. Even though the stories' themes are different, they are actually some similarities found between them such as scariness, the unknown, and the consequences of doing something for the loved person and the death. In this essay, I am going to explain why these scary stories intrigued and fascinated me.

First of all, one of the three stories,” The wrong grave” by Kelly Link, is a story that concerns a boyfriend named Miles Sperry tries to recover his poems ('Three haikus, a sestina, and two villanelles. Some longer pieces.') from the grave of his girlfriend Bethany Baldwin. He'd thrown them in there as some grand gesture (”what he’d felt was a beautiful and romantic gesture”). What is interesting when Miles opens the casket of his dead girlfriend is that he doesn’t recognize his beloved one and instead, he is confusing her with another girl who frightened him. It’s not something very strange that Miles confused Bethany with another girl because she changed her look: ”She was several years older than Bethany. She was taller and had a significantly more developed rack. She even had a tattoo. The smile of the wrong dead girl was white and orthodontically perfected. Bethany had had braces.” Also, another interesting fact about this confusion is that Bethany’s mother is the only one who recognized her daughter even though she had coiled hair that looked hideous. Miles tries to escape from ”the wrong dead girl” named Gloria Palnick but he can’t because every time he thinks he got away she always manages to find him. After a while, he got used to the idea of the girl chasing him. He was actually ”beginning to feel he would have liked the dead girl under other circumstances”. Miles thought it was a betrayal from him for thinking that Gloria is a pretty girl despite the fact she is dead and also her horrible hair.” And his girlfriend was already dead. But he thought that ”Bethany might have liked the dead girl too.” After some discussions between Miles and Gloria, he started to see more parts of Bethany in her (they both used Chap-sticks) and confessed this ”You sound like her.Bethany.You say the same kind of stuff.” Even though the girl looked totally different than his girlfriend, she could not change her behavior. This is what happens in real life too: you may change your aspect and try to look like a whole new person, but you cannot change your character and your soul. Just as the author wrote ”we don’t often get a chance to see our dead. Still, less often do we know them when we see them.” Bethany telling her mother that she ”played a good joke on him” is showing me that she saw her relationship with Miles as a kids game, just like we all think about love between some teenagers - immature. The end of the scary story had left me in curiosity because all that the narrator wrote was that ”the dead girl left town as the sun was coming up. I won’t tell you where she went.” And after a series of ”maybes,” he got us caught in the vid. With this end he wanted us to remain speechless, trying to figure it what happened with the dead girl.

Second of all, another scary story that got me thinking is ”The heart of another” by Marcus Sedgwick which starts off by an unnamed girl describing her first awakenings in a hospital. The story causes the reader to become curious so the reader will continue reading the story. Discovering that she has a new heart, memories of treatment and Cyclosporine, are blacking out. She regards the new heart as “a dark forest,” and compares it to Poe’s stories – ”The Speculations of Edgar Allan Poe”. She told her tutor John that she had a lot of weird dreams. In the next coming days, she had a revelation. The dreams weren’t about her, but the man whose heart she carried: ”I woke without screaming because I had realized that the dream wasn’t about me at all. It was about him- the man who’d died and whose heart I was now in possession of”. Her horror dreams became transformed into something different: sympathy. In this horrific and static life that she lived, she suddenly began to see things differently. She started to appreciate the gift of life, the small things such as swimming, running, walking, even got her a gym membership. The day she did this, she confessed that ”that day was incredible” to her. She felt stronger than she’d ever felt. This is all about in life- we have to stop staying in our comfort zone and just enjoy our gift of life by doing stuff that we love, by influence the people to do something good in this life, to help and respect each other. But at the end of the day, the thought of the murder of her heart donator really disturbed the girls' peace. So, she tried to explain this to John when he was constantly talking about how her thesis is not ready and how she was the best student he had ever had. Then the most intrigued moment happened: the girl found out that John had killed them, all of them with a donor card until the right one was found. John tries to leave, and then a questionable act happened, two arms wrapped around Johns's neck, allowing no air to pass until he stopped moving. So here is where the mystery is growing: ”but I don’t know whether it was me or my heart that really killed him”. This got me thinking if the new heart made her do this just how we see before in some situations when she started to want to drink a beer, swim, run and even go to the gym. She later discovered that the 24-year old man who was her donator ”was a dockworker, from the fishing house, and a fitness fanatic. One of his friends even said,” I can’t believe he won’t be there for a beer after work”.Maybe it is the new heart that got her feeling all these staffs, so why would not the wish of the donator’s heart want an act of revenge and just kill John. The end got us all meditating about what actually really happened in the girl’s mind.

Furthermore, the last story ”The house and the locket” by Chris Wooding is about the narrator, a young rake, and his friend Henry spend an evening on the town before the narrator is to marry his childhood sweetheart, Lizabeth. Even though they had the ”passion bloomed between them” and ”there was a stillness about Lizabeth that quieted the torment of adolescence, a calm center ” to the man’s storm, he could not stay faithful to her. On their way home, the narrator and his friend saw that they were stalked by a mysterious creature. They got scared and started running and finally they refugeed in s very strange house which is a very powerful element in scary stories: ” It was ancient, a squat and imposing block of stone surrounded by thick forest. Its edges were crumbling and its windows grimed. Its aspect made me fearful”. Both are accosted by spirits during the night: a woman who calls the narrator 'Husband' and a hanged man with his face. A very strange moment in the story is the moment when the narrator fell asleep in the haunted house and thinking about his Lizabeth, he felt a presence next to him and he eventually rolled onto his side and laid his hand ”lightly upon her cheek” his being closed. What I find strange about this scene is how could he feel even for a second that the one standing next to him and touching him was his beloved person. Eventually, they discover a diary, dated twelve years in the future and written by a boy named Henry, that tells of a family tragedy: his mother locked him in the attic before confronting his father about his betrayals, and as they fought, the father struck and accidentally killed her. His father did not know his son was trapped upstairs, so the kid died because of hunger and thirst. What a tragedy for just a little kid. The narrator's friend, Henry, is killed during their escape from the house. During this time, the narrator finally realized what a fool he was to risk Lizabeth’s love by his ”wanderings by dalliances with other women who were but a pale shadow of her”. After all the things that happened in his life, the narrator married to Lizabeth and tried to be a good husband to his beloved not wanting the warning he received from the wife of the scary house ( ” Do not forget me husband. You have been warned”) to come true - 'Not for me, not for Lizabeth, and not for my son, Henry.' The story’s final made me wondering if that is what would have happened in the future if he would have not stopped betraying his wife and sleep with other women. In this case, I think that he received a good lesson- he has to appreciate Lizabeth’s love and always remain faithful in everything.

To sum up, the stories are bizarre and fabulous and even though the individual stories deal in different realms of the supernatural, all of the tales possess a common thematic element, the dead. More specifically, the restless dead. More importantly than shared themes, every story in this collection is unique, well-written, and very engrossing. Cheerfully off-kilter and subtly (or not-so-subtly) surreal stories that tread a wide terrain from teen love and loss to worlds pregnant with magic and sacrifice, to dark urban dreamscapes. All told in a disarming, almost chatty, narrative voice that hooks the reader pretty quickly and completely. In my opinion, the stories ”The wrong grave” by Kelly Link; ”The heart of another” by Marcus Sedgewick and ”The house and the Locket” by Chris Wooding are filled with great suspense, mystery, fantasy, and questionable acts, making you ”thirsty” for more information, wanting to know the truth and what had really happened in the end. I think that the narrators did a really good job on the finals of the stories letting us in doubt and always using our loaf.