Seeing the cover of Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (1981) has a powerfully Proustian effect on me: my stomach drops a little bit and a shiver of twinned fear and delight runs down my spine, even now, some 35 or so years after I first encountered it as a precocious pre-teen. At the time, I was a voracious and omnivorous reader with an appetite for books that my parents fully encouraged.
My tastes were wide and varied: some of my favourite books from this period included L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series, the Sweet Valley High and The Baby-Sitters Club books. There was also the occasional Agatha Christie crime novel and something from R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series. The latter two arguably introduced me to that delicious thrill of being frightened by what I read and inspired me to seek out other works with a similar “scare factor”.
