Bedtime Stories to Darken Your Dreams (Paperback)

What I had in mind was a picture book with color illustrations and very little text on each page. The book would look like a children's book, even though "Dead Boy" was clearly a story for adults.

As it turned out, Alan liked my story, but not my format. He wanted to do a book, but not the one I proposed. We eventually decided to produce an illustrated anthology of stories that were in the same tradition as "The Dead Boy at Your Window." At first, we had a hard time articulating what that tradition was. We solicited stories anyway, accepted work written in this tradition we couldn't name, and pretty soon we had a book.

Now that we're ready to go to press, I can finally say what kind of stories we were looking for, and found. This is a book of stories in the Scary Daddy tradition.

This book had its real beginnings in my father's dramatic readings of scary bedtime stories. My father could read any story with flair, but he excelled at the spooky warble of the ghost who cries, "Who's got my hairy toe?" When he read a scary story to me, my brother, or my sister, he knew where to whisper to make our hair stand on end, and where to shout to get us to jump out of our pajamas. He did a very convincing, deeply resonant villainous laugh.

My father is a gentle man. My siblings and I knew we were safe with him, that there wasn't anything truly scary about him. On the other hand, fathers have the potential to be very scary indeed. The Greeks were expressing a psychological truth when they had Chronos devouring his children...in self-defense! In time, children grow up and displace their parents, a process that makes children and parents alike uneasy. It seems to make fathers more uneasy than mothers.

So the underlying psychological reality was probably why we all, father and children, took such delight in the Scary Daddy. The Scary Daddy was a safe and loving expression of Chronos, who would always be with us whether we acknowledged him or not.

As Alan and I worked on this book, I discovered that his father had also read bedtime stories in the tradition of the Scary Daddy. Both of our fathers had delighted in spooky readings of the James Whitcomb Riley poem, "Little Orphant Annie." I expect that there's a Scary Daddy in the childhood of a lot of writers and artists whose work has a certain transgressive edge.

The transgressions in this book are gentle ones. That's the way of the Scary Daddy. He's not gruesome or gory. He's unsettling. Of course, he can't unsettle you with the same tricks he used when you fell for: "Who's got my hairy toe?...YOU'VE GOT IT!" We aren't as easy to unsettle now as we were when we were small.

Here then, for an adult palate, are the unsettling and funny juxtapositions of Ray Vukcevich's "My Mustache" and "We Retire to the Desert." We give you the adolescent unease of "The Lonely Gorilla" by Melanie Tem. Michael Arnzen's poems echo the creepiness of the supermarket tabloids.

Some of these stories remain a bit mysterious to us. Why, exactly, is Jerry Oltion's "Winners" so disquieting? Alan and I don't know. But we do know that the Scary Daddy would read that story to us in his spookiest voice, smile his Scariest smile, and turn out the light.

Sweet dreams.