The True Scary Story? When Kids Don’t Read

Seven-year-olds Max Dower and Eloise Ker of Hollywood may not know a lot about literature, but they know what they like.

“We like to be scared a lot,” Max says.

The two pals have formed a secret club where they trade Goosebumps paperbacks, including “Monster Blood,” “Stay Out of the Basement” and “Say Cheese and Die.”

“They’re, like, pretty scary,” Eloise says, adding that she also likes to be scared by movies. “Me too,” Max says.

R.L. Stine’s horror stories for children 8 to 12 are now selling 3.3 million books a month worldwide, say publishers at Scholastic. The fright contained in the Goosebumps series is mostly the benign variety: the bad dream; the cold hand on the shoulder; the oozing, threatening, glowing green gunk.

But Stine’s teen series, Fear Street, gets more intense (“Holding his breath against the foul odor, Brandt forced himself to look. The small body was decomposed.”), as do other coming-of-age murder stories popular with teenagers.

The delight that many kids take in exploring gore gives some adults goose bumps. But child development experts say their interest serves an important purpose. Scary stories boost children’s confidence in facing the demons of real life they sense are lying in wait for them down the road.

John Wright, professor at the University of Michigan Center for Human Growth and Development, says the books are “transient things filling a lasting role, confronting uncertainty and danger and then mastering it.”

Wright says children gradually acquire a sense of what is truly dangerous to them. While preschoolers might worry that a plane they saw crash on TV might land on their house, older children tend to react according to how others are shown reacting to the frightening event. Eventually, he says, “You’re no longer thinking of yourself as a victim.”

As children gain competence in coping with fear, Wright says, they get a sense of being in charge. “The actual act of mastering fears becomes a pleasure in its own right so that they start saying, ‘Not only am I not scared to jump off a diving board, but I really get a kick out of showing you how unscared I am and I’ll do it backward just to show you.’ ”

Wright says most experts no longer subscribe to the theories of psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who argued in his 1976 book “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning & Importance of Fairy Tales” (Knopf) that children make use of frightening fairy tales to help them manage internal fears of loss and abandonment. “The Bettelheim-type theories may have some utility in dealing with people with emotional or behavior problems in a clinical way but do not describe the everyday way normal children cope with the real world,” Wright says.

“When you are just getting in charge of yourself and imagining the far-out, whether it’s sexual, terroristic, science fiction or terrors of your own mind, mastering it is fun. By and large, that’s constructive.”

And let’s not pretend that it’s just kids we’re talking about.

Grown-ups who delight in adult versions of R.L. Stine books but complain their children are reading junk are hypocrites for holding children to a higher standard, says Anne Connor, children’s services coordinator at the Los Angeles Public Library.

In Los Angeles, where elementary students test below the national median in reading, it is encouraging to see any kid with a book in his hands. Reading for fun, and being excited about what’s in a book, Connor says, “is half the battle.”