“The Big Toe” (1981)

Serious hats off to children’s author Alvin Schwartz, self-designated “collector” of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its companion pieces More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones. It’s remarkably good stuff and an incidental clinic in how to do horror, both implicitly and explicitly (with stage cues and such for telling these stories aloud). Reportedly a generation was scarred by them. The slim little volumes are illustrated by Stephen Gammell, whose images haunt as much as the stories can bite. Really. They are officially intended for ages 8 to 12 but “The Big Toe” is a good example of how Schwartz dances around any constrictions or proprieties. It all happens in a rush in the setup. A boy finds a big toe at the edge of the garden. He tries to pull it up but it’s attached to something. Then it comes free. Something groans and he hurries home. His mother’s response, verbatim: “It looks nice and plump. I’ll put it in the soup, and we’ll have it for supper.” And so they do, and then it is on to the storytelling part, when the family has gone to bed and something comes into their house looking for its toe. There is even a second, alternate ending which has its own jump-scare moment for the teller to utilize. Already we have shifted into the mechanics of a prank and how to pull it off, as if we have forgotten about the big toe. Which was attached to something and nice and plump and they ate it. They ate it. How is a kid not going to obsess about this later? The way everybody just acts like it’s normal. What’s it, a funny-shaped turnip or something?! There’s a lot of that in these collections and also a lot of innocent fun, blindfolded or in the dark feeling grapes as eyeballs, cold spaghetti as ... something, I forget, and more just party entertainment instruction like that. Schwartz collected his story material from old folk tales and they are often quite weird and stay with you too. I don’t often recommend YA lit, let alone middle-school class, but there’s a lot of good stuff here and interesting pointers on horror. This one operates on misdirection—hits us with the toe business but keeps moving, softening us up for the inevitable fallout to come as the mind grapples with the points of the story. Moral: Don’t eat big toes, even if they’re nice and plump.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Alvin Schwartz, ed., Stephen Gammell, ill.
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