I had already written a draft of The City by the time the first Foxes came out. It also put an immense pressure on me to deliver something that good again. The thought still brings me to tears a bit. It forced me to accept that my work does have value and that all the years I spent sacrificing other parts of life to hone my craft were worth it. First, it made me believe in myself as a storyteller.

What happens when your life has more value as a product than an independent spirit? It’s fun to scare kids, but at the end of the day, I want them to be wiser and stronger for it.Ī belated congrats for the Newbery Honor! Did receiving the Newbery Honor for the first Scary Stories installment affect your writing, or your plans for the second book?Ībso lutely. What happens when you can no longer trust a once beloved adult? Rabid Miss Vix as a zombie figure.

Kids are aware of way more than we as grown-ups are comfortable with, especially with the internet, so why not give them a safe space to come to understand those bewildering or unsettling things they’ve stumbled upon? The stories in Foxes get dark, for sure, but they all have value in the real world. There’s also the hilariously true Maurice Sendak quote where he warns kids never to tell their parents what they know because it would terrify them. I love this quote from Neil Gaiman: “I personally believe that if you are keeping people-young people-safe from the darkness, then, when the darkness shows up, you are denying them tools or weapons that they might have needed and could have had.” I want to give kids those tools so that when the darkness-a pandemic, global warming, social unrest-inevitably shows up, their nervous systems will have already taken a practice ride on the rollercoaster of terror, and they might just be ready to face the real thing. But there are other things, scary things, that I think kids need to know before they enter this increasingly complex and, let’s be honest, terrifying world. I think there are some things that kids absolutely do not need to hear about until they’re grown. I like to knock down walls in fiction, and there are more walls in children’s literature than anywhere else. What draws you to horror for young readers? The Scary Stories for Young Foxes books are fairly dark for middle grade.

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