Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

In fiction, setting—the time and place where a narrative unfolds—anchors a story in an all-important grounding of logic, verisimilitude, and atmosphere, giving its imaginary events a basic believability and emotional power. In a horror story, the setting plays a particularly crucial role since the events are largely illogical and unnatural: The story’s backdrop must prepare the listener/reader for the supernatural (or otherwise disorienting) events to come, often by creating a mood of isolation, danger, or the uncanny. For instance, horror stories tend to strand their protagonists, usually alone, in dark, menacing places far from home: abandoned houses, nocturnal forests, misty paths, old graveyards, and lonely highways. From the start, these settings weave an atmosphere of loneliness, vulnerability, and dread, so when the horrific or supernatural elements of the tale come into play, they appear almost logical to the reader. The isolated setting also intensifies the terror: Cut off from all help and perhaps doubting their rational state of mind, the lone protagonist has little or no avenue of retreat or reassurance. Most of the tales in Scary Stories feature backdrops like this—dark, lonely settings familiar to the reader from other spooky stories—serving as spine-tingling variations on a well-known theme.