31 Days of Horror: Day 19-- Why I Love Horror by Public Librarian Maisie Iven

The children are reading horror in large numbers. The children have always read horror in large numbers, but the librarians are starting to note the checkouts rising. In fact, later this month I will have a post with more facts about this claim. 

As I wear my hat as on of the Co-Chairs of Summer Scares, I have also noticed more school and public libraries using the Summer Scares selections and programming guides to engage kids with horror all year long.

The increase is so noticeable, we have recruited two Middle Grade librarians to help us as we craft the programing guide for 2027. We have always had volunteers who work with an adults and teens, but for the Middle Grade programming ideas and planning, we have not had specific experts.

No longer. This year we welcome both a public library and a School Library MG Horror expert to our Summer Scares Programming Guide team. 

But before we put them to work on the guide, I asked both to introduce themselves by sharing a Why I Love Horror essay with all of you.

First up today is Maisie Iven, the Nichols Library Children’s Services Manager for the Naperville [IL] Public Library. They are also a former member of the iREAD committee. iREAD is a sponsor for Summer Scares.

What I about Maisie's essay is they are able to connect their own experience with horror as a kid and through into adulthood with their kid patrons. We have Maisie's personal story and one specific kid they interact with at their public library.

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Why I Love Horror 

by Maisie Iven

It’s 8:03 pm on a school night and the children’s department of the library is mostly empty. This makes sense–most of our prime customers have early bed times, having to turn in before they turn into cranky monsters. 

But there is one little girl standing at the reference desk, she’s nine and wearing mismatched knee socks and an oversized Minecraft hoodie. “I need the scariest book you can find, stat,” she says.

“Hmmmmmm, how scary we talking? Bone chilling? Spine tingling? GROSS-GUSTING?” I ask. 

“So scary I can’t think straight.” 

And we’re off. I hand her piles of books, we talk about things she finds scary, things she doesn’t. We talk about what the last scary book she read was and why she thought it was scary. She tells me about how her parents want her to read more and they don’t care what, how her teacher read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (Alvin Schwartz) for Halloween last year and she’d loved it, and then, so quiet I can barely hear, she says “I liked it because it made everything else feel less scary.”

It catches me for a second, because she’s nailed it, she’s gotten exactly to the core of what horror has always meant to me. 

I think like a lot of kids, my default emotion as a child was fear. I was scared of strangers. I was scared of tests. I was scared my mom–a single parent after my dad passed away–would be in a horrifying house fire and die, leaving my brother and I as displaced as orphans (à la  Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events) to be passed around to various eccentric relatives and wayward guardians. 

I crafted elaborate rituals to ensure that she was fine. If I paused reading for the night with a paragraph left in a chapter, she wouldn’t die in her sleep. If I avoided stepping on the black tiles at school, and only stepped on the blue, she wouldn’t be in a car accident. If I avoided using the bathroom during class hours, nothing bad could happen to her while I was at school that day. My worries gnawed at me all day long, making it hard to let myself just be a kid. 

Maybe it’s important to know that most people with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder will spend years dealing with a brain designed to loop fears and worries in twisted cycle after cycle before being diagnosed. When I was small, these fears mostly had to do with various people in my life dying in strange and unsettling ways, usually gleaned from whatever fragment of a news story I’d encountered. (Don’t get me started on the anthrax attacks of the early 2000s). 

While mine was an extreme case, it’s rare to encounter kids who don’t have some deep core nightmares.

After all, we come into this world without a guidebook and with so many new things to learn about, many of which can be deeply frightening. Emergency sirens aren’t designed for sensitive kid ears. All foods are new at some point. Strangers–good and bad–abound. Learning to navigate all of that can be overwhelming and anxiety producing. I often find myself thinking that childhood is the home of horror.

And in the same way, horror is also the home of childhood. It’s where we all come from, and as we learn more, we forget how scared we were and recontextualize it as learning. I can promise you, the rose-colored glasses we think about childhood with are something we get when we’re older.  When we’re young, we know it’s overwhelming, and frightening, and everything feels awful. 

But something being fine in hindsight and something being horrifying in the moment are two things that can, and must, exist at once. 

When it comes to treating OCD, the number one skill you have to learn is sitting with discomfort, holding worries and fears within while you do the scary thing anyway. It often feels like the hardest thing in the world. But the thing that made it bearable, the thing that let me put aside my fears for just a little while, was horror. 

This might seem counterintuitive. I was worried about my mom dying so I read books where kids encountered vampire guidance counselors (Debbie Dadey’s Dracula Doesn’t Drink Lemonade), ghosts haunting their stepsisters (Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn), and even monstrous librarians running the summer reading program (RL Stine’s The Girl Who Cried Monsters). But it did help, and it taught me two very important things. 

All my myriad fears were ultimately less fraught and awful than what the protagonists of my favorite books might face. Sure, I may have bestowed myself with the responsibility of keeping my family alive at age 8, but I wasn’t also dealing with a vampire rabbit (James and Deborah Howe’s Bunnicula). Some of these books were so scary that they did, just as my future Minecraft-clad patron would one day tell me, make everything else less scary.

But the other lesson, which was far more important, was that there was always something to do, always something to try. 

While adult horror might stray into the bleak and defeated (and some of my favorite horror novels and films do), horror for children tells you while there ARE monsters, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck. While fantasy might resolve with the noble protagonist dethroning the evil king and slaying the hungry dragon, horror can often be bleaker, darker, which feels in many ways far more honest. Sometimes the monsters win, sometimes they lose, but either way, you will try your best. 

Since becoming a librarian, I have used horror as a spark point to have deep discussions about race in North America with a group of teen boys (thank you, The Diviners by Libba Bray and The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline), helped a middle school girl find books that would actually keep her interest (snaps to Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson and Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare), and helped a woman find books to binge read to distract her from the discomfort of chemotherapy (the perfect excuse for Stephen Graham Jones’ extensive back catalog). But the moments that have stuck with me closest are the times I’ve helped our youngest customers find those titles that tell them that fear is not insurmountable, suffering is not the end, and that you will face monsters, but you will rise to the challenge. 

We live in a world in which children die of brain tumors, genocides, and school shootings. We ask young people to swallow hard truths and face threats that would overwhelm adults. And we ask them to do all this while also learning how to do math, how friendships work, and how to eat vegetables even if you think they’re smelly. Of course kids love horror, didn’t you love your childhood home? 

It’s 8:34pm on a school night, and we finish checking out the stack of books. 

“Can I come back and tell you if they were scary enough?” the girl in the Minecraft hoodie asks, her pile of titles tall and precarious. 

“Absolutely, and if they’re not, we’ll find something scarier.” 

“Perfect,” she laughs. 

And it is perfect, the scariest things in life usually are. 

And because I’m a librarian and can’t stop myself from giving recommendations, I got permission to share Minecraft hoodie’s top ten best scary books she’s read, and they are below: 

1. Small Spaces by Katherine Arden
2. Scary Stories for Young Foxes by Christian McKay Heidecker
3. Fake Blood by Whitney Gardner 
4. Scritch Scratch by Lindsay Currie
5. Spirit Hunters by Ellen Oh
6. The Ghost Book by Remy Lai
7. The Jumbies by Tracie Baptise 
8. The Bellwoods Game by Celia Krampien
9. It Found Us also by Lindsay Currie (can you tell who her favorite author is?)
10. Tunnel of Bones by VE Schwab

She comes into the library at least once a week to plow through another stack of books. Recently, she’s graduated up to YA titles, and I’m excited to hear what else she’s been reading.