Scary Stories to Tell In The Dark (Literature)/Nightmare Fuel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • "Maybe You Will Remember". A girl's mother dies in a hotel, and the hotel makes it look like nobody had been in the room. Quite a nightmare: lost in a foreign city, losing a loved one, the entire hotel keeping secrets from you, thinking you're insane, not knowing what to do. The worst part? It's based on real events.
  • One of the most boring stories in the book gets one of the most terrifying illustrations: "The Haunted House". Building is haunted. Rabbi is called in to exorcise. He meets the ghost. The ghost tells him where some treasure is. The rabbi digs up the treasure. The ghost is put at peace. They all lived happily ever after.
  • "Harold". A living scarecrow SKINS A MAN ALIVE and leaves his skin out to dry in the sun. And this was suggested reading for elementary school students?
  • Someone was nice enough to post a mini-gallery of Gammell's work on some message boards. Enjoy. And by "enjoy" I mean "lie awake and sweating at 3 am as these images drift across your consciousness".
  • "The Red Spot". A girl develops a red bump on her face. She doesn't know what it is, her family can't figure it out, and even a doctor they bring in can't work it out. The whole time the bump is just growing and itching. At the end, red bump suddenly bursts while the girl is taking a bath, a swarm of small spiders crawling out from where their mother had laid eggs in her cheek.
  • The story about the potato-sack monster on the ceiling of the young girl's room, with the beady eyes and tons of sharp tiny little teeth.
  • "Is Something Wrong?"'s illustration. Some...thing with a giant bloody skull for a head is tapping a man on the shoulder.
  • The story about the vampire corpse and the window will make you move any beds near a window far, far away.
  • "Me Tie Doe Tie Walker". Not just the extremely scary illustration of a screaming decapitated head in a fireplace, but the fact that this story takes the comfort of having a dog with you when you're scared, and tells you that the dog will lead some horror to you, then drop dead before it can protect you.
  • "The Dream"'s illustration. The story very simply describes the mysterious woman of the eponymous dream as having "a pale face, black eyes, and long black hair". Unfortunately, Stephen Gammell took the already present eeriness of the situation and cranked it Up to Eleven by giving the woman beady eyes, a jaw like an orangutan, and an alien-esque slit-like mouth. Plus, the expression she's wearing is vague, but can't quite be called a smile. Or if it is, then it's like the Joker's smile; you can't tell if it's happy or sinister.
  • "Oh, Susannah!" Not only is the illustration terrifying, it has little, if anything, to do with the story it accompanies.
  • "Sam's New Pet". A boy's parents find a scruffy little dog while on vacation in Mexico and decide to bring it home for him. A few days later the dog starts foaming at the mouth, so they take it to the vet. He tells them that it's a sewer rat with rabies. Terrifying illustration enclosed [dead link].
  • "Someone Fell From Aloft" has a fairly simple but haunting image of a man clutching a body as he appears to fall. It illustrates the climax of the (relatively simple) ghost story in the most sparse yet terrifying way possible. Our friend Stephen simply refuses to ever draw normal human beings in any of the images in these books, and so you get to see the faint black outline of what is supposedly the guy from the story being grabbed by a screaming oily corpse and taken overboard.
  • "The Drum" is a tale of young sisters who continually misbehave and eventually have their mother replaced by...some thing as a punishment. You just have to read the description of the replacement mother and wonder why? Just why?
  • "What Do You Come For?" has one of the grimmest examples of a wish backfiring. A nice old lady wishes she had some company to ease her loneliness, and then...well, see for yourself.
  • Stephen Gammell's illustrations are so scary, that they actually got a mention in Lemon Demon's song "Nightmare Fuel".
  • "The Bed by the Window". An old man becomes so jealous of his roommate's ability to look out the window and see the world. The friend describes many wonderful things out there, and the old man essentially murders him, allowing him to claim his bed. In the end, he discovers there is nothing out the window other than a brick wall. It just seems symbolic for the ugliness of the human soul.
  • "The Voice" is full of Paranoia Fuel and Nothing Is Scarier in a short chapter. The titular voice keeps whispering to Ellen that it's getting closer and closer to her bed until... "I'VE GOT YOU!" She screams, and her parents come looking for what had scared her, but they can't find anything. And the story ends with just that.
  • "The Black Dog" features the titular hound haunting a man every night at eleven o'clock. It doesn't do anything bad at first, but it's only when he brings his two guard dogs inside that things get hairy. The dogs sense the black dog in the room and bark fiercely, only for the black dog to attack one of the dogs and kill it while the other dog cowers in fear. After that, the man has to let the black dog be and let it roam his house every night.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Scary_Stories_to_Tell_In_The_Dark_(Literature)/Nightmare_Fuel?oldid=1894538"