The Literary Folklore of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Dream (1991).

It's difficult to know where to begin.  This is one of the major problems with those works of fiction which manage to achieve a kind of culturally monolithic status in the minds of generations of fans.  There's so much to talk about you that you don't know where to start.  That's the way it is for a lot of 80s and 90s kids when it comes to the reputation of Alvin Schwartz's collection of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  In some ways, it's not the sort of outcome you might expect for a book series like this.  While the reputation of Schwartz's books are widespread now, what's interesting about the way the series grew it's reputation is just how quiet it all was in comparison to the way any work of print fiction catches on the pop culture zeitgeist now.  Schwartz never got to enjoy the kind of digital connectivity that later writers like Suzanne Collins were to have and benefit from.  He was one of the world's last great analog children's writers.  His texts were made and produced in an era when word of mouth was a very literal term and practice  The first book in the collection hit the shelves in the year 1981.  Computers and video games were already making waves, yet both were still so much in the crib that it's useless to talk about them with the same ubiquity they have now.  No one could share info on these weird little tomes on a message board somewhere, the way we all can now.  It really was one of the few examples of a genuine literary underground phenomenon amongst the Young Adult Reader bracket.  It all seems to have started as its own, peculiar form of urban legend.

Perhaps that's kind of fitting for a collection dedicated to the preservation of Old World Folklore, with a particular emphasis on the Macabre.  It marks the books as having a literary debut that's fitting to the way in which they were constructed, with just as much patient care in terms of scholarship, as much as the regular necessity of story craft.  What happened is that one kid somewhere in the United States would see the first volume on a bookstore shelf somewhere, or tucked away in the stacks of the local school library, and the very first thing that got their attention was the book's cover art.  Here's the part where I have to pause and give a detour for a bit.  Partly that's because I'll get flamed into oblivion if I don't.  And also it's because there's really no longer any way you can separate Schwartz's text from the illustrations of Stephen Gammell.  The first thing about that initial volume in the series that jumps right out at the viewer is the sight of a decaying human skull with bits of flesh still hanging onto it, including a set of very devious looking eyes, which peer out at the reader with an equal sense of menace and invitation.  It's a real "Step into my parlor, said the Spider to the Fly" type moment.  You can tell right away that Gammell's grotesque cover mascot is there to beckon the reader in, and also deliver one hell of a fair warning in just that one, single side-eye glance.  This book ain't here to hold you hand, folks.

That cover is letting you know that it means nothing other than dead serious business.  It's here to entertain ya, if you'll let it.  Heaven help you, however, if ever think it's there to hold your hand.  If that's what you're after then you're in the wrong place, my friend.  You'd better leave, because what's waiting for you in the pages beyond the cover is nothing less than on ongoing gallery of fresh nightmares, each of them brought to a wonderful, ghastly sort of half-life through Gammell's pen and paint brush in combination with Schwartz's stories.  In a fitting irony, it is the words of the books most virulent critic, Sandy Vanderburg that sums it up best.  In a Chicago Tribune article, Vanderburg is quoted as saying, “If these books were movies, they’d be R-rated because of the graphic violence (web)".  To which all I can say, looking back on those thoughts today is, "Ma'am, take my word for it.  I can only wish that's the kind of final product we got out of those books".  By all rights any decent adaptation should gear itself more towards the Tales From the Crypt and Creepshow crowd.  It shouldn't be concerned with catering to the Young Adults, and should instead focus on the actual mature content of the folklore that Schwartz crammed into each volume.  I'd even go so far as to argue the fact that any decent adaptation of this material would have to veer into a hard R rating is one of the strange glories of the book's success.

That's because while it might have been Schwartz's intention to cater to the Pre-Teen demographic, in order to do so, he relied on series of ancient folktales whose roots and origins are anything but child friendly.  The fact that some parents likely told such stories to actual children as far back in the Middle Ages says more about how our ideas of what is appropriate for young audiences has changed, more than it does about the content of the tales themselves.  Still, that's how it all began, with some kid somewhere deciding to be brave enough to pick that first installment off the shelf, with the skeletal head grinning at you like the Crypt-Keeper waiting for you to take a peak into a dark and twisted other world.  The kid would then come away so impressed that he'd then go out and share the text with his friends on the playground or at their after-school hangouts.  Those friends would then see what he was talking about, and come away just as frightened, and therefore delighted as that first lucky audience member.  From there, everything about the series just grew, until it's become the beloved staple of 80s and 90s childhoods that it is today.  What I don't think gets enough appreciation as it should, however, is the amount of scholarship that Schwartz placed into those updated collections of ghoulish folklore.  Hence this article's efforts.

What I'd like to do is mix things up here, not by a lot, just a little.  There may be a few elements of the regular review style in this essay, where it seems appropriate.  However the main focus will be on revealing the hidden qualities of learning that Schwartz brought to bear upon his stories.  A better and fuller understanding of this collection of ghastly tales is helped a great deal by keeping in mind that it's not just a work of fictional artistry, but also that of folklore, proper.  It means there's an extra layer of strategy at work in these books, one that perhaps offers an overlooked explanation for why they've lasted so long.  One that goes beyond the usual fan reactions of just praising Gammell's warped, yet admittedly brilliant art style.  This is a perspective that keeps in mind the pedagogical aim that Schwartz had for his collections.  He meant them to be as much as learning as a frightening, and entertaining experience.  It's what explains the most unique feature of all three books.  These have got to be the sole YA short story series I'm aware of that have actual scholarly footnotes attached at the end of each volume.  In the back of all three entries is where readers can join Schwartz as he dons his professor's cap, and tries to see how well his audience has been paying attention to the folk studies aspect of his efforts.  The dearth of commentary here isn't encouraging on that score.

It tells me that no one is taking seriously the goals Schwartz set out for himself in writing this series.  He wanted to see if it was possible to find a way to make learning about folklore fun for kids.  His big light bulb idea was to realize that at least there was a chance this could be done, provided the lesson plan was packed into the kind of entertainment that kids loved to interact with.  His genius move was in realizing just how much kids love to be spooked by a good scary story, and how well this insight jibed with the kind of tales from old times that he'd collected in his job as a folklorist.  What better way to get kids interested in all of this quaint and curious forgotten lore than by repackaging them as a book of Horror stories.  In some ways, this also means that the very cause of the books' success has also been somewhat of an undoing for the purpose it was meant to serve.  The twin strengths of Schwartz's skills as a natural storyteller combined with Gammell's Inspired sense of the nightmarish means it's always these two elements that anybody remembers nowadays about the books.  This state of things tends to hold true even for those of us who've still kept ahold of our old, battered, yet well loved childhood copies from elementary school.  That's not to say this isn't without reason, just that we're missing the full picture, here.

If you want to get a completed picture of the idea Schwartz was trying to pass on to future generations when they were young, then it helps to see what can be done by actually taking the time to interact with the scholarship that's presented at the end of each book, and see what happens.  There's at least one enterprising fan out there who's taken it upon himself to get things rolling in this direction.  I'm sure Jon Solo is, as of this writing, something of an honest-to-goodness Internet personality.  His specific area of expertise is in trying to dig down into the roots of our favorite stories, and pop cultural pastimes, and see just how far down the rabbit hole of artistic Inspiration he can go.  He does all of this with a constant, recurring interest in world folklore.  In other words, he's sort of the ideal audience member that Schwartz might have been looking for this whole time.  Not too long ago I ran across a video of Jon's that contained just enough of the best sort of information that would help a reader gain a better understanding of the scholarship that Alvin placed into his books.  What makes this particular video an ideal subject for an article examining the scholarship behind Scary Stories is because of a hint dropped in the course of his excavation into the source material Schwartz complied for the third volume entry called, "The Dream".

The Folk Story, Some Commentary, and a Forgotten Literary Context.

The Art of the Story.

The helpful aspect of Solo's examination of "The Dream" is that he's able to pinpoint the way in which it differs from most of the other pieces in the Scary Stories collection.  Rather than being a simple retelling of a folktale, this is one of just two times where the narrative derives from a legitimate literary source.  The second was "The Drum", which appears in the series' second installment.  The other is this story, in which a girl who suffers the consequences stemming from a prophetic dream that doesn't take long to become a living nightmare.  In fact, if you stop and think it over, there's at least a certain amount of similarities between the underlying trope of Schwartz's retelling, and that of, say, the original Nightmare on Elm Street.  All that the Scary Stories version of this idea does is to take the concept of the nightmare brought to life, and do it in a much more artful and sophisticated fashion.  I think it helps to highlight the level of genuine artistic quality involved with Schwartz's rendition of a familiar trope.  One of the first things that jumps out at the reader is it's narratological simplicity.  As Solo points out, it bears all the hallmarks of a one act play told in roughly four scenes: (1) the dream itself; (2) the attempt to outrun the predictions of the nightmare; (3) the nightmare comes to life; (4) the protagonist flees for her life.  The folktale as laid out fits neatly within Stephen King's definition of the Horror story pared down to its purest essence.

In his 1981 non-fiction study, Danse Macabre, he labels such efforts as "Tales of the Hook".  The example he uses to characterize the kind of narrative Schwartz lays out for us is another urban legend, namely that of "The Hook".  That particular folktale is almost a different beast from the one about the Pale Lady, yet it's possible to argue that they both serve the same function, and operate in similar fashions.  King says "The story of The Hook is a simple, brutal classic of horror. It offers no characterization, no theme, no particular artifice; it does not aspire to symbolic beauty or try to summarize the times, the mind, or the human spirit. To find these things we must go to “literature”—perhaps to Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which is very much like the story of The Hook in its plot and construction. No, the story of The Hook exists for one reason and one reason alone: to scare the shit out of little kids after the sun goes down.

"One could jigger the story of The Hook to make him—it— a creature from outer space, and you could attribute this creature's ability to travel across the parsecs to a photon drive or a warp drive; you could make it a creature from an alternate earth a la Clifford D. Simak. But none of these sf conventions would turn the story of The Hook into science fiction. It’s a flesh-crawler pure and simple, and in its direct point-to-point progress, its brevity, and its use of story only as a means to get to the effect in the last sentence, it is remarkably similar to John Carpenter’s Halloween (“It was the bogey man,” Jamie Lee Curtis says at the end of that film. “As a matter of fact,” Donald Pleasence agrees softly, “it was.”) or The Fog. Both of these movies are extremely frightening, but the story of The Hook was there first (21)".  I think the tale of "The Dream" fits in well with the rubric King lays out above well enough.  Like the story of "The Hook", the trope of the nightmare come true is told in a sparse and economic prose.  Schwartz realizes his main job here is to be a storyteller first and last.  He may have some lofty enough goals in presenting these stories to the reading public (more of which anon), yet he never lets these personal ambitions cloud his understanding that the story remains the boss at the end of the day. 

The key point is always the same, "This is what happened".  The prose itself may be a bit more clean than the rendition of "The Hook" which King gives to his readers in the pages of Macabre, yet the focus on what might be termed The Law of Narrative Conservation remains one of the key features necessary to the tale's success.  In just one paragraph of no more than three sentences, we have our main character, her situation, and what she plans to do next.  That's all the writer needs to get the setup out of the way, and its easy to see one of the reasons why stories such as this have been able to hang around for so long.  There's something about the inherent simplicity of the folktale which makes it ideal for a social media world where the quality of any piece of writing is determined by the number of likes for a Twitter or Instagram post.  The format is so adaptable precisely because it is an ongoing way of the folk, that it's apparently the one format of storytelling that the audience can pick up on without having to be told about it.  We just seem to sort of...do it, really.  What's striking about all that is the lack of self-awareness that's involved.  Still, Schwartz knows his audiences and is able to match his style to them.

His paragraphs, like his sentences, remain tight and compact demonstrations of narrative precision, with not a wasted word in sight.  The best demonstration of Schwartz's skills at narrative compactness is the fact it takes him just two paragraphs (both made up of no more than five sentences each) to lay out the main inciting event of the plot.  This includes two of the three main aspects of the titular prophetic nightmare: the layout of the dream's setting, and the build-up to the arrival of the Horror at the center of the plot.  Take for instance the way Schwartz describes how the nightmarish prophecy starts out.  "(That) night Lucy Morgan had a strange dream. She dreamed that she was walking up a dark, carved staircase and entered a bedroom. It was an ordinary room except for two things. The carpet was made up of large squares that looked like trapdoors. And each of the windows was fastened shut with big nails that stuck up out of the wood (53)".  It takes just a few lines to lay out this dream setting, and yet for my money its always remains one of the most uncanny examples of a liminal space in the annals of imaginative Gothic fiction.  The author's words are able to conjure an image in the mind of this strange, dusty, somehow hollowed out looking blank space.  In my mind it's dark outside, yet the staircase and the dwelling its in seem to be well lit.  Yet the light just serves to enhance the uncanny nature here.

Even before we reach the room where the Horror is to take place, there's the sense of a place that's out of joint.  The staircase Lucy climbs has this odd complexion to it, if that makes any sense.  It hovers somewhere between a light, yet sickly pale, yellow color, or else at other times it looks to be this dried up shade of light gray.  The overall impression is that we're in a space that is somehow well put together, and yet there's already this odd sense of decay lingering about, ready to creep into the very woodwork the protagonist is standing on.  In my mind's eye, the sound effects department insists on adding in a series of eerie sounding creaks made by the floorboards as Lucy makes her way up the stairs, and the cinematographer in my head insists that the door she enters to reach to room is also of the same kind as you you use to enter an attic, rather a room proper.  It all come together to create the same effect.  Even before the Terror is cued to shamble out of the darkness onto the stage, every detail about this place seems wrong on a level that you're able to see, yet somehow can't place.  That creeping, out-of-joint feeling is heightened once the protagonist enters the story's main setting.  The descriptions Schwartz utilizes in this moment might just count as one of the masterstrokes of the series as a whole.

There's been a tendency on the part of what little commentary this series has received to zero in on Gammell's illustrations at the expense of Schwartz's words.  I'd like to offer his descriptions of Lucy's liminal space as a demonstration that there is in fact a genuine amount of literary skill baked into the proceedings. "She dreamed that she was walking up a dark, carved staircase and entered a bedroom. It was an ordinary room except for two things. The carpet was made up of large squares that looked like trapdoors. And each of the windows was fastened shut with big nails that stuck up out of the wood (ibid)".  The detail is limited, and the prose is Spartan, yet it's amazing to discover what Schwartz is able to do in the space of just three lines.  Somehow, that's all he needs to get the point of his story, and its effects across.  In order to understand how he goes about this, it helps to unpack the content of his words a bit in order to get clearer look at the engine that makes this story run.  Aside from the prototypical dark staircase, the exact contours or nature of the room the main character enters is deliberately left as vague, and enigmatic.  We're never given a clear snapshot photo of the stage itself, only those details the author feels are best suited to the uncanny atmosphere he wants to convey to us.

In the strictest sense, we aren't told much of anything about the Dream Room at all, really.  Though if some of you reading this are ready to object at this point, citing how that's not possible, seeing as how you yourself have a clear image of the room Lucy enters in your head, then the only logical response to that is congratulations, you've managed to let Schwartz weave the first half of his spell on you be letting the story and it's creep factor get into your mind, thus allowing the reader to complete the second half of the enchantment necessary for the scene to achieve its final, eventual payoff.  What we have here is something of an unsung marvel in the history of the Gothic genre.  It's nothing more than the usual sequence where its time for the Horror of the story to make its debut bow in the spotlight.  It's a scenario that is perhaps as old as Grendel bursting through the doors of Heorot in an old English poem.  In this sense, there's more than one reason for saying it's a mistake to claim that Schwartz is doing anything original with his material.  Instead, an accurate way to describe this scene would be to say that he's shown readers and future talents how to breath a sense of genuine life into the oldest of possible genre cliches.  The way he does it here is by zeroing in on the details needed to make the scene work.

The most Schwartz ever tells us about the room Lucy enters is that it looks normal except for a carpet made up of large squares that somehow give the impression that you're staring at a series of concentrically arranged trap doors craved into the floor, and that the windows have all been nailed shut.  What's fascinating about these details is that it's somehow all the scene needs to be able to put us off and therefore on our guard.  While most of us were expecting to see something out of the norm waiting for us on the other side of the door, what we're given is unnerving precisely because of how it clashes with the regular sense of safety we know we're supposed to feel when choosing a place settle down for the night.  We expect such a shelter to at least be somewhat livable, even if we're just passing through.  One of the major reasons why we're unnerved by the idea of a Horror, whether Supernatural or otherwise, stepping into such a setting is because of the way it creates an inherently wrong sense of transgression into what was meant as a safe space.  The eruption of Horror into what we hope is a normal environment serves to shatter our shared illusion that we can just buffer ourselves off from whatever else is out there.  That all our attempts at creating a safety line are just so much houses built on sand. 

It's this latent expectation of normalcy being violated that makes Schwartz's description of the room so impactful.  It starts with the reassuring words that everything about the place looks normal, only to the narrative to turn around and contradict its own words in the very next sentence.  Perhaps the most prototypical aspect is the scene of windows nailed shut.  The image is almost a cliche in and of itself, the type of set decoration that you'd expect to find in countless examples of this kind of story, all the way from Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Blair Witch Project.  What's remarkable about Schwartz's use of the trope here is how he almost seems to make it work be underselling it.  He never bothers to elaborate on the image of the windows in the Dream Room, except to note that you can see the nails sticking out of the wood where someone must have hammered them in.  What really seems to give the setting its true note of unease is the writer's description of that odd sounding carpet.  On the one hand, it's a mundane household item.  There's nothing particularly off-putting about a square pattern floor installation.  It's the way Schwartz tells how carpet makes it look as if the floor of the room is covered by the lids of a series of trapdoors that somehow serves as the crowing touch of the whole picture.

It's able to take the following image of windows nailed shut to suggest a stage set with a distinct yet somehow hard to place sense of menace about it.  It suggests that there are secrets hidden away somewhere within this liminal space, possibly underneath the floorboards, and that whatever is hidden in them is a dark mystery which creates just the right sense of ghastly sounding danger the story needs in order to create the tension that sooner or later this room will tell us about whatever it's hiding, and yet that's almost the worst part about the setup.  When that happens, our expectation is for the air of menace that hangs over the scene to break out into one of unqualified threat.  Once more, the true reason why all this build-up works so well is because Schwartz has a knack for letting his words creep inside the minds of his readers.  He deploys a form of Gothic Minimalism to set his main stage in just a handful of carefully chosen plot details.  Some are tried and true tropes, such as the image of windows in a haunted house, with the doors nailed shut, while others rely on a strange, yet pitch perfect sense of Surrealism that somehow manages to successfully put across the suggestion of a liminal space in which there are just enough off-putting details present to get our minds hooked on the scares the author has in store.

It's all down to Schwartz's skill in making us use our Imaginations to do all the rest of the heavy lifting for him.  He supplies his reader with just enough details to suggest an idea of what Stephen King elsewhere refers to as "The Bad Place".  It's clear the Room in the Dream is meant to stand for the sight of some kind of horrific crime, the exact nature of which we never learn, which itself allows our minds to run wild with all sorts of ghoulish possibilities.  It's all a clear cut case of the author trusting in the idea that less can often amount to more in cases like this.  That sometimes it's the things you can't see, or are never told about that amount to the true generators of fear in the audience.  It's the same winning creative strategy that earlier authors such as Shirley Jackson relied to populate Hill House with its unseen, laughing horrors.  Schwartz can be seen relying on the same method, at least in part, in order to set the stage for the terrifying payoff in "The Dream".  The nature of the Dream Room is laid out in such a way as to create one of the great unsung liminal spaces in Horror fiction.  Under the spell of Schwartz's prose, it's possible for the mind to not just conjure up a bare depiction of the room Lucy finds herself in.  It's possible to catch the unnatural tone of the atmosphere of that imaginary place.

The storyteller's talent here is such that we don't just listen to to what Schwartz is telling us.  We can actually see the way that light falls through the windows of that room, lending it an indescribable heavy air in the atmosphere, as we look around and observe that same pale, sickly light yellowish color has followed us beyond the staircase.  We can see how it's difficult to tell if we're looking at just a simple carpet where the pattern in the weaving is playing tricks with our eyes, or if maybe there's no covering there at all, and instead the floor of the room really is composed of trap doors, each one of which leads down into a Bluebeard's Chamber of full of the rotting bones of previous visitors, or else something far worse.  That's the unspoken brilliance of how Schwartz's writing is able to compliment Gammell's art in ways that I don't think many people have caught on to yet.  It's an error of judgment which has somehow become part of the common knowledge people think they have about the books as a whole.  That's sort of one of the reasons for why this article even exists, to try and correct the record where it's needed.  So far, however, we've limited our discussion Schwartz's technical and stylistic prowess as a writer.  There's still the role that scholarship plays in the way the writer compiles and composes the stories in the Scary Stories collection.  What makes the "The Dream" such a good candidate for this kind of study is because it's one of the places where the scholarship contacts with Gothic literature.

The Hidden Literary Source Material Behind the Retelling.   

When it comes to the literary side of this grade school-and-up short story, it's Jon Solo's own words that give us a good layout of the background Schwartz was working with in order to construct his modern day folk narrative.  According to Jon, "For those who want to research these stories on their own, you can actually find these sources that Alvin Schwartz used in a section called Notes and Sources.  It's found in the back of every book.  In the case of the Pale Lady, Schwartz mentions two sources of Inspiration, the folklore of prophetic dreams, and a haunting experience that English writer Augustus Hare details in his autobiography.  We'll start with the autobiography, because it will segue nicely into the discussion of prophetic dreams.  So just to be clear, the author Augustus Hare did not have any otherworldly experiences himself.  He was told this story in the 1800s by a family friend, whom he considered an aunt: Mrs. Gaskell.  Mrs. Gaskell was told this story by a family friend of her own, Mrs. Hibbert.  Who in turn, knew it from someone who knew the victim personally".  Cue the Ferris Bueller "word of mouth" telephone punchline scene.  The point being that the origins of this story counts as nothing less than a modern day exercise in urban legend myth-making.  This isn't a problem in and of itself.  What does become somewhat problematic is Solo's overall dismissive attitude towards it all.

He lets us know that "The only reason that Hibbert shared it with Gaskell was because Mrs. Gaskell was a writer.  So Mrs. Hibbert was trusted that she would remember it accurately, and apparently Gaskell felt the same way about Augustus Hare".  "Everybody got that?!  Good"!  It's what Solo tells us next that proves unfortunate.  After laying out the breadcrumb trail for how this forgotten story wound up on Alvin Schwartz's doorstep, Solo then makes a rather bold claim.  "I know that's a lot of names to remember, but I have good news.  You can forget all of them immediately, and it won't make a difference".  I'd argue that Solo has made a critical error there, in contrast.  The reason I'm willing to criticize the critic here is because it's precisely by choosing to look into the main writer from whom this story sprang that readers begin to discover the layers of forgotten artistry hidden away in this simple folk re-telling of a nightmare come true.  In order to do so, however, we have to pay more attention to  the creative source behind it all, in order to understand why Solo is wrong in believing there's nothing else to uncover about "The Dream".  To do this, we have to focus on the figure of Hare's aunt.

Her full name was Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson, and while she was a housewife and mother by marriage, she was also a very talented writer, both by choice and talent.  She was born in London's Chelsea district in 1810, though most of her formative years were spent in a village located in the Cheshire countryside.  In 1832, Elizabeth fell for and married a Unitarian minister, Williams Gaskell, and became the mother of four daughters.  By all accounts, they seemed to be able to make the partnership work out.  It was Gaskell's childhood impressions that seem to have played a large part in the shaping of her Imaginative capabilities, because in later years she would take those memories of small town village life, and transform it all into a satirical Manners and Morals novel known as Cranford.  She deserves all the praise she got for that book, yet the irony for an American audience is that it's subject matter is so tied to a specific location that it's no real surprise if her name and efforts aren't as well known Across the Pond as they are in her native English soil.  Cranford was a literary sensation in her day, though.  It was considered important enough that it allowed Gaskell to strike up a lifelong friendship with some guy by the name of Charles Dickens, if that makes any difference.  Once they became acquainted, Elizabeth remained a regular contributor to Dicken's magazine periodicals.

It was a role Gaskell would maintain for the remainder of her life, and I'd argue the fact that Dickens had enough respect for her skills as a writer is the best testament she ever had.  While she was known as a writer of social realist novels in her heyday, the passage of time has shifted the focus quite a bit.  Gaskell's reputation now seems to rest to a great extent on her efforts as a writer of Gothic short stories.  These are the writings she seems to be best remembered for now, and her energies in this field result in the author taking her place in a long line of pioneers.  This is because the historical record shows it was women who did the most to construct our idea of how the Horror Story functions, and what it's capable of.  Go back, for instance, and look at a number of works by a writer named Anne Radcliffe.  If you can manage to page your way through books like The Mysteries of Udolpho, or The Romance of the Forest, then it soon becomes clear that for all of their dated qualities, the fact remains that you've just shaken hands with Horror fiction's very own Great Grandmother.  While the action and dialogue of these novels might come off as wooden or stilted to 20th and 21st century minds, what shouldn't be overlooked is the fact that it was authors like Radcliffe and Gaskell who were the first to pioneer so many of the tropes that have since become irrevocably linked with the genre where things go bump in the night.

This can even extend to those four most well-worn of cliches: the Byronic Hero, the Jock, the Woman of Loose Morals, the Slacker, and yes, even the Final Girl.  All of them start to make their first appearances in the works of late Eighteenth to mid 19th century pioneers of the novel format.  Some of the first novels were written in the Gothic genre, and most of them came from the hands of women like Radcliffe and Gaskell.  The former artist even deserves credit for crafting the first modern instance of what we'd now probably think of as The Scooby Doo Plot.  It's the one where things start out as if we're definitely dealing with a bunch of genuine supernatural phenomenon, only for the ghosts and monsters to be unmasked in the last act.  Where it's revealed that the spectral phantom wandering the halls at night is really the wicked uncle, crooked lawyer, twisted family doctor, or more common than all of these, the illegitimate long lost relative hoping to claim the fortune inheritance of the Gothic Heroine, and sometimes the Fair Maiden herself is added into these schemes, whether she wants to be a part of it or not.  All of that material which is now often the stuff of familiar Saturday Morning Filler was given its first dramatic stage debut in the pages of the first Horror novels, most of them written by women.

This is the specific Literary Tradition in which Gaskell functions as one of the pioneering Individual Talents.  What makes her connection to "The Dream" so fascinating is that according to Solo and Augustus Hare, it remains one of the great untold ghost stories of the artist's career.  My own research has revealed that this is and isn't a true statement.  It's true enough that what we're dealing with here is the one idea Gaskell had that she never bothered to write down herself.  Instead, she told it to others, who went on to elaborate it for her, after a fashion.  The whole process of "The Dream's" road to completion and retelling all ties into the way Solo described it, as a modern form of urban legend creation.  It's a textbook example of a Gothic story overheard by many listeners, who in turn become narrators as they pass the folklore along.  In Gaskell's case. the story she related to others is more or less as Solo describes it above.  Though according to literary scholar Carol Martin, there are details that the YouTube vlogger got wrong.  In her essay Gaskell's Ghosts, Martin helps set the historical record straight.  It's there Martin clears up Solo's chronology of composition.  Turns it was Mrs. Caroline Hibbert who told Augustus Hare about a story Liz Gaskell related to her, as a longtime friend, just a few weeks before the proverbial and literal death of the author.  It's an example of where history demonstrates its importance by how it gets lost in translation, and time can obscure the facts.

The point is that the tale of "The Dream" seems to have first originated not from a strictly folkloric, but rather from a literary source.  It all seems to have been started by Elizabeth Gaskell as a fireside story she told to her friend Caroline.  According to Martin, "Who entrusted Gaskell with the tale, or what the consequence was to which she referred is not clear. The story is one that Gaskell seems to have had in mind for many years, for, as recorded by Hare, its general outline is very similar to that of "To Be Read at Dusk," a story that Dickens had published in the early 1850s and to which Gaskell referred in a letter to Eliza Fox  tentatively dated 17 November 1851...If she told the story to Mrs. Hibbert in 1865, because it needed to be recorded, as Hare says, she must have had a strange lapse of memory regarding the Dickens' work (Martin, 31-32)".  The fact that the creator of Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge plays the part of an unnoticed contributor to Schwartz's latter day folktale is something we'll have to address on its own.  For the moment, it's enough to say that beyond getting the facts of history a bit mixed up, the rest of what Solo tells us about Gaskells second-hand story as it was related to Hare is still accurate.  The tale really does revolve around a woman who marries a certain Major Alcock.

As all the narrators prior to Schwartz tell it, things with the marriage seemed normal at first, until Mrs. Alcock began to suffer from dreams and waking hallucinations.  The pattern of these night terrors was always the same.  Whether awake or asleep, Mrs. Alcock would keep seeing the face of a mysterious looking man wherever she went.  This phantom figure is never described in the account that Hare gives us, though this does assist the reader in letting our Imaginations fill in any possible ghastly details that are omitted from the account.  We never learn, for instance, if the man in Mrs. Alcock's visions had the same "pale face and black eyes and long black hair" as his Scary Stories counterpart, yet that's the glory Horror of tales.  Sometimes the best ones are those that leave you having to guess at what's lurking in the dark.  In Gaskell's account, for instance, all we need to know is that Mrs. Alcock grows steadily more convinced that this Pale Man is somehow stalking her, even in her nightmares, which should sound familiar enough to modern audiences.  Her husband and the family doctor chalks it all up to "Phantasmagoria" brought about by nervous exhaustion, so the couple decides a holiday rest in Rome is the ticket needed to settle her nerves.  What happens next is where the story sort of tips its hand a bit.

In the second volume of his autobiography, Hare gives the reader a very specific and detailed description of the place where Major Alcock and his haunted wife decide to spend their vacation.  It's the way Hare, Hibbert, and Gaskell design their collective imaginary stage set, and what unfolds there, which sort of clues the reader in to the kind of story they're reading.  The group narrative goes as follows: "One of the oldest established hotels in Rome is the Hotel d'Angleterre in the Bocca di Leone. It was to it that travelers generally went first when they arrived at Rome in the old vetturino days", either Gaskell or Hare then makes sure to add one specific note of the Macabre to the stage decoration: "and there, by the fountain near the hotel door which plays into a sarcophagus under the shadow of two old pepper-trees, idle contadini used to collect in old days to see the foreigners arrive (309)".  What happens next should come as no surprise, considering the kind of story we're being told.  The "Alcock family rolled into the Bocca di Leone and stopped at the door of the Hotel d'Angleterre. Major Alcock got out, and Mrs. Alcock got out, but, as she was descending the steps of the carriage, she happened to glance round at the group under the pepper-trees, and she uttered a piercing shriek, fell down upon the ground, and was carried unconscious into the hotel.

"When Mrs. Alcock came to herself, she affirmed that amongst the group near the door of the hotel she had recognized the owner of the face which had so long tormented her, and she was certain that some dreadful misfortune was about to overwhelm her (ibid)".  If the presence an entrance leading to an underground boneyard right next to the doorway of one of Europe's grand hotels sounds a bit too on the nose to take seriously, then you're right.  A simple Google search reveals that while the Hotel d'Angleterre is a real place, there has never been any record of Rome's (in)famous underground catacombs located anywhere near the vicinity.  In other words the detail is all a deliberate elaboration of the fiction, Gaskell seems to have made that part up.  It's pretty easy to see why, when it's done for the sake of the story's dramatic effect.  It might be a cliche on its own, yet it gets the job done.  There's also the fact that locating the Dream Specter near the entrance to a tomb goes a long way toward hinting at the exact nature of the Heroine's threat.  In tried and true genre fashion, the tale ends with Mrs. Alcock insisting that the owner of the Pale Face in the Dream is closing in on her.  No one around her listens to her fears, leaving her helpless and defenseless, until one day she seems to disappear into thin air

Hare writes: "She was never, never heard of again. There was no trace of her whatever. All that ever was known of Mrs. Alcock was that, on the day of her disappearance, some people who knew her were walking in front of S. John Lateran, and saw a carriage driving very rapidly towards the Porta S. Giovanni Laterano, and in it sat Mrs. Alcock crying and wringing her hands as if her heart would break, and by her side there sat a strange man, with the face she had so often described (311)".  Cue the Crypt-keeper with his typical, ghoulish, parting pun: "You'll be glad to know at least that the poor young lady was gifted a bouquet for all her troubles.  I just love scarnations, don't you?  Heh-heh-heh-heee"!  So that's the story behind "The Dream".  All that remains is to ask the question of what it all amounts to?

Conclusion: The Importance of Background and Context.    

When you learn it was women who were in large part responsible for the development of the Horror story, especially back in the early days of the genre's history, then, sooner or later, it starts to cast an interesting light on the tropes we now take for granted, and sometimes even parody and poke fun of.  Once you take into account the sort of loaded dice the average woman of Charles Dickens' era had to put up with, then it's like a lot of those old cliches begin to make an ironic, sometimes even downright bitter form of logical sense.  It throws a glaring spotlight on all of the glaring gaps of our so-called Era of Enlightenment.  Not only is there a gulf of separation between theory and practice when it comes to a woman's self-determination, a greater perspective on the themes and issues explored by a lot of these Early Gothic Grandmothers goes a long way toward highlighting what I'm going to call the "Continuity of Human Behavior".  What I'm talking about here is the results you'll get if you go back and pay close attention to the manners and social mores that are brought up in a lot of Women's Victorian Horror Fiction.  The first picture that greets an intelligent reader is nothing less than the same crap that girls in our day have to find ways of either challenging outright, or else maneuvering around to whatever advantage they can find, or manage.  

What discoveries like this tell me is that it's a dangerous mistake to believe the passage of time alone is enough to create a world of difference between how we behave now, and they way we acted back then.  To leaf through the works of Anne Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Edith Wharton is to find oneself confronted with the same material that often turns up as a minor domestic item on the nightly news, where a woman ends up either battered or dead thanks to the machinations of the men in their lives.  It's the same raw deal that artists like the creator of Frankenstein had to put up with on a lot of occasions from the man who claimed to love her.  The point is it doesn't matter how much talent someone like Percy Shelley has in his index finger.  At the end of the day, the fact remains he still could be something of bastard to his wife, especially since its always possible to claim he really did love her.  It's the same obstacle course that women have had to run through in our own day.  What makes its appearance in the Victorian Age so awful is that the abuses existed more or less as an enshrined form of standing public law.  Hence we have a good idea not only of the Gothic Tradition of which Mrs. Gaskell was a part of, but also of the social situations and problems to which Early Modern Horror acted as a response to

Lisa Kroger and Melanie Anderson are able to provide as neat a summary of the place and setting that Elizabeth found herself in amidst this Tradition as an Individual Talent.  In their non-fiction work, Monster, She Wrote, Kroger and Anderson state that "Gaskell is best known for her realist novels that criticized the social ills of her day. In the 1830s she and her husband and daughters lived in Manchester, England, a hotbed of industry and radical politics and a microcosm of the problems facing the nation. The once small town was booming thanks hanks to the explosion of industrialization and factory work. Child labor was common, as was unemployment without a  constant need of workers, factories would lay off employees often and without warning. Though the working class was growing in numbers, it remained unable to catch up to the aristocratic upper class in affluence. Gaskell’s desire to help alleviate poverty and call attention to the plight of women in particular led to some of her best-known work and, at one point, the destruction of a few copies of one of her books by her Unitarian minister husband’s church congregation (against his wishes) - including...Mary Barton, North and South (1854-55) and Cranford (1851-53), which was adapted for television by the BBC in 2007.  

"Gaskell explored social issues in her novels, but she used the short story format to delve into more ghostly subjects. These works appeared frequently in Dickens's periodicals, especially his supernatural-themed Christmas issues. She was fascinated by English folklore, and often her stories take the form of a tale handed down through generations, with a kernel of truth at the center. Her belief in the adage that power corrupts, as well as her fascination with the repression of past abuses in family histories, became recurring themes in her short fiction (54-55)".  The outline provided by Kroger and Anderson appears to be nothing less than a neat outline of the basic critical consensus of the author's reputation.  It matches with the words Laura Kranzler used to describe Elizabeth's artistry in the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of the writer's Gothic Tales.  It's there that Kranzler writes: "In Gaskell’s Gothic scenarios, it is usually the female characters who are victimized by the males, and it is this investment in exposing the conflict between the powerful and the powerless that links these stories and novellas most explicitly with the themes of her better-known full-length works (xi)".  

Kranzler elaborates on this point by stating that "Part of what constitutes the Gothic experience in these stories is the split between different forms of identity and between different forms of authority - in terms of gender, history and textuality - and how those boundaries are themselves transgressed. In Gaskell’s stories and novellas, what has been repressed continues to return, fact continually merges into fiction, and it is these shifts between what is real and what is imagined - seeing that ghost in the everyday street — that makes these stories so compelling (xii)".  Kranzler doesn't got into as much detail on this point, yet it's clear the nature of this "split" which defines Gaskell's Horror fiction revolves around not just authority, but power.  A better way to say it is that Elizabeth's ghost stories revolve in one way or another around the struggle between Power vs. Agency as the former is directed against women and their shared plight as thinking and aspiring people at the mercy of the series and cycles of repression and suppressions that defined the Victorian Era and its numerous moral compromises.  It's something Elizabeth was always aware of, and it soon became something she struggled against.  In this she can be said to have joined in the same crusade of emancipation alongside Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen.

It's a theme she tackles time an again in her Gothic narratives, and the result is very accurately described by Carol Martin in her essay on Gaskell's Ghosts.  "Feeling, then, both rebellious and...defiant of the world's opinion and yet fearing it, it is no wonder that Gaskell uses the possibilities of the ghost story to depict a powerful woman who dares to defy heaven and earth, but whose power turns back upon herself and makes her, once again, a victim...But in the remote time and place and the supernatural context of the ghost story, a special wildness, an uncontrolled power, can be allowed to the women characters without their forfeiting the reader's sympathy. At the same time, the ghost story presents a dark vision of the trap women are in, in a culture...that views them as..."either a great sinner or a great saint"...with not much room between (38-39)".  Martin then sums up the over-arching theme of Elizabeth's fiction as follows. 

"Though she was undoubtedly intrigued by the ghost story for its own sake, liking the lore of the folk around her as well as, simply, a good story, Gaskell's ghost stories, like her other works, tell important truths; they express her deepest fears of what can happen if women do not have the "esprit de corps" of Cranford, the sisterly bonding of Wives and Daughters, the dynamic outlet of a changing society that offers them scope to act, as in North and South. In these tales she acknowledges the sexual and social power of the patriarchy which poses a threat no mid-century rationalism and optimism can deny (39)".  The net result is that the reader is left with a greater sense of clarity about the moral imperative that still manages to underpin even the most cliche of tropes surrounding one of the Horror genre's most defining ideas.  That being the concept of a Gothic Heroine, or Final Girl, having to maneuver her way through a gauntlet of lethal threats as she tries to outrun and outlast the Horror at the dark heart of her narrative.  What writers like Gaskell and Radcliffe leave us with is best described as a creative challenge coupled with a dilemma.  The challenge is to see if its possible to wake modern audiences up out of their familiarity bred stupor (bordering sometimes on contempt) with which we tend to approach the familiar Horror staple of Women in Peril.  Gaskell wants us to see the greater thematic import of the trope itself.

The dilemma is that, in the strictest sense, while this does grant modern viewers and readers a new vantage point from which to view tried and true contemporary "texts" such as Psycho, The Haunting, and even "The Dream", it still doesn't erase two facts that tend to work against it.  The first is that a good gulf of years span the gap between the point when artists like Gaskell and Radcliffe were highlighting the inherent literary qualities, and even intelligence of the Final Girl trope, and the way that directors like Hitchcock or writers like Shirley Jackson and Alvin Schwartz utilized them in their own works.  This is not a criticism of the filmmaker and the two writers just mentioned above.  There's nothing inherently wrong with the way they use the tropes established by the Gaskell and her sisters-in-arms long ago.  Indeed, it's even possible to claim that in the case a story such as The Haunting, an inheritor like Shirly has helped to raise these ideas back to a level closely approximating their original artistic depth.  Instead, the problem is more that time has a way of making things familiar, and even when familiarity doesn't breed contempt, it can still help to foster a kind of dulled sense of inattention.  Of making even the female viewers in the audience think that what they're looking at is just another old and worn cliche, with nothing more to it worth thinking about.  Who pays attention to Horror, anyway?

The initial challenges laid down by the likes of Gaskell and her fellow Gothic pioneers thus becomes one of finding out how to raise the viewers awareness of the pedigree behind the tropes that even a director like John Carpenter is able to put to good use when he sets Michael Myers loose on the streets of Everytown USA.  This challenge also serves to brings things more or less full circle, as we end things where we started by asking where does Alvin Schwartz's own modern folk rendition fit in with the ideas and history just brought back to light?  After digging through all the forgotten history attached to "The Dream" entry of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, I'm left with at least three possible conclusions.  The first is that the short story as it appears in the third volume of the collection can stand on its own two feet.  It remains an underrated marvel of storytelling precision and compactness, with one of the best exercises in literary dread I've ever seen on the page.  The second result is that it still comes with a great deal of literary history and pedigree attached to it in the form of Elizabeth Gaskell as an unremarked upon Inspiration point.  This has the effect of broadening the lens through which "The Dream" can and should be viewed.  It adds a layer of thematic commentary which is tied not only to the Victorian Ghost Story Tradition, but also to how the early Horror genre tackled the question of women's rights and struggles in a society that would turn an entire half of the species into second class citizens.

This is a key point underlying the entire plot of Gaskell's original folktale.  What Schwartz has done with his modern update it to recast the nature of the threat.  It's here that Jon Solo's commentary comes in handy once more.  He's good at teasing out the hidden implications of "The Dream's" narrative.  He points out that the purpose of the Pale Lady is to serve as a figure of both Gothic prophecy and warning.  Rather than being placed there as a straightforward threat or menace in her own right, she instead functions as someone who tries (albeit in skin-crawling fashion) to protect the main character from harm.  While it is possible to see the Dream Figure as part of the threat to be avoided, I'd argue that Solo's interpretation of the Pale Lady and her purpose is the most valid option.  She's not meant to the main threat here, as was the case with Gaskell's Pale Man.  Instead, it makes sense to see her as the implied victim of the Dorsett Landlady, who was willing to let the next boarder to come along be her next victim.  This re-arrangement on Schwartz's part serves to turn the Pale Lady into a personification of the Gothic Omen trope.  A figure of fear which is meant to be a grotesque "Beware" sign for the story's Gothic Heroine (another famous example of this trope in literature would be the mutilated ghostly character of Victor Pascow from Stephen King's Pet Semetary, who provides a similar function).

The key thing to note about Schwartz's retelling is the specific way it recasts the true evil at the heart of the story.  He takes Gaskell's theme of the oppression and violence that men force upon women, and then remakes it into a narrative where the threat comes from one's own gender.  This is hardly a unique spin for this type of setup, all you have to do is go back to the original Friday the 13th to see more or less the same scenario play out on the screen.  It's the themes uncovered by the discovery of Gaskell herself as the story's true origin point which leads me to my final conclusion.  "The Dream" is fine enough as Schwartz gives it to us.  I'd argue against trying to alter it in any way, shape, or form.  What I would suggest, however, is that it might be possible to expand upon this story in a different format, and in a way that brings things closer to the original themes that Gaskell had in mind when she told her original version of the folktale.  What I'd do is this.  See if it's possible to go back to the drawing board and make an entire film based around just "The Dream" as a stand alone feature.  We've already seen how it's possible to make the Pale Lady into a live action character, so let's put her to better use.

Make an adaptation that's truer to Schwartz's source text, yet be sure to craft one simple addition that switches the thematic import of the story back toward the themes that Elizabeth Gaskell tackled in her own Gothic Tales.  Let the ultimate threat come not from a woman, but from a man.  Let the figure of Schwartz's nameless Landlady become a Landlord, perhaps in the vein of another urban legend, that of H.H. Holmes and his Murder House.  Let this version of Lucy find herself drawn to a fictionalized version of Holmes and his Slaughter Castle, where the action can be elaborated upon to the point where everything culminates in Lucy discovering the Landlord's Bluebeard Chamber where he's kept all of his other victims.  From there, everything can fall into place as a simple Slasher Villain stalks Final Girl scenario.  The best suggestion I have for an ending is pretty self-explanatory.  Let the Pale Lady appear on-stage at the climax in order to be the one who takes down the Landlord as Lucy watches on with a mixture of horror that ultimately shades into a mingled form of a repulsed relief mingled with a genuine form of gratefulness, as she thanks the Lady for helping her.  You may even see what can be done with a gruesome, yet somehow heartwarming image of Lucy and the Pale Woman embracing in a non-fatal, parting hug, before she sets off back into the sunlit world to tell everyone about the Murder Hotel.  

These are all the best possible suggestions I can offer for ways of showcasing Schwartz's skills as a folk storyteller in a way that remains true to the basic gist of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, while also bringing back the narrative themes and ideas contained in its original Victorian source material.  As things stand, however, it still goes without saying that Alvin Schwartz and Elizabeth Gaskell have both managed to give us a winning pair of complimentary versions of the same story.  Both "The Dream" and "The Pale Man" work in a way that manages to do what all good Horror fiction should, it provides the dedicated Horror fan with the kind of story you can sink you're teeth into.  What makes each variation work is the simplicity of its setup and execution.  What Gaskell and Schwartz have given readers is a set of well told campfire tales.  These are the kinds of stories you can settle in an enjoy as a good fireside hearth read for when the Sun goes down, and shadows lengthen.  In the preface to the very first volume of his anthology, Schwartz writes of how "Telling scary stories is something people have done for thousands of years, for most of us like being scared in that way (2)".  It's as strange yet true a fact of life now as it was when Schwartz wrote those words, or when Liz Gaskell told her own folktale to Mrs. Hibbert way back in the Gaslit Era.  The impulse underlying both stories is the same.  It's here to tell us a good spooky yarn that will give us the best sort of shivers, the ones that allow to have fun with fear.