Close
Enter your
text here

Enter… if you dare!



Hi there! I'm Siobhán, a children's book editor who is totally obsessed with horror. This blog is where I explore the spooky, the macabre, the gory and the strange in stories, TV shows, films and games just for kids and teenagers.

This is the sister blog to Writer and the Wolf, my editing website. If you’re writing your own children’s book, head over there for advice and support!

Sweet dreams! Should your middle grade horror have a happy ending?
 1024 576 Siobhan O'Brien Holmes
By:

I’m often asked whether children’s horror novels should end on a cheerful note with the threat fully defused, giving young readers the closure they need to drift off happily to sleep.

In adult horror fiction and film, there’s no guarantee things will turn out well for the protagonist. And even if the final girl does skip off to tell the tale, or the traumatised family finally sells that haunted house and moves far away, their lives have undoubtedly changed for the worse. Think of famous scary stories with a relatively happy ending – The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Hill House, The Shining, Scream, The Exorcist. The protagonists all escape the threat and good wins out over evil, but could you really call those endings happy?

As adults, we don’t expect to walk away from a horror story feeling warm and fuzzy. Many of us love horror precisely because we want to remain unsettled and frightened beyond the last page (or end credits). That’s the definition of the genre: its purpose is to create feelings of fear, dread or repulsion. But is there room in middle grade for bleak, unnerving endings? Can the monster sometimes win or does the protagonist always have to get away safely?

What sets middle grade horror apart from the rest?

Let’s start by looking at the obvious differences between children’s and adult horror fiction:

    • Middle grade horror fiction typically shouldn’t feature mature content like sex, violence and swearing
    • The protagonist will usually be a child under 13
    • Adults, particularly parents, are unlikely to get too involved in the story, leaving the children to confront and overcome their fears alone

But the other difference is that middle grade stories will usually give the reader closure. Reading in the Dark (a wonderful book about children’s horror) explains how this works:

The true nature of the monster is discovered and its power dissipated. The threat is over. Adult horror usually leaves the door ajar so we don’t fully understand the monster and don’t get closure.

That’s a really important distinction! Horror gives young readers a safe space to face and explore their fears; however frightening or gruesome the story, the last page will usually leave them feeling secure and empowered. The child conquered the beast, the witch melted into a puddle, the talking doll got smashed to pieces. Kids expect that closure because there’s usually a predictable structure to their horror stories, just like they expect the puzzle to be solved at the end of a mystery book or for a fairytale to end happily ever after. In most children’s horror, the story ends with the protagonist confronting and defeating the villain.

A lurking threat

But sometimes that door is left slightly ajar, even in children’s books. Take A Most Peculiar Toy Factory by Alex Bell, a creepy tale (aimed at reluctant readers and children with dyslexia) of killer teddy bears in a defunct Wonka-style factory. The child protagonists battle against the teddies and ultimately destroy them, leaving the terrified dolls and rocking horses finally safe from the bears’ sharp claws and snapping teeth. But just when we think the horror is over, one of the rescued mermaid dolls gets a funny look in her eye. Has the teddies’ curse been transferred to her?

In an excellent post on The Horror Writers’ Association YA blog, children’s librarian Amanda Bressler argues that the best sort of kids’ horror ending isn’t happy or sad, it’s ambiguous.

However, to me, the best and most memorable endings for children’s books are the ones that are able to capture the uncertainty of the future—realism—while also providing some redemption for the main character—idealism. These ambiguous endings leave the reader wondering why bad (or at least not entirely good) things happen to the characters we like and what could come next for those characters. Unlike “happily ever after,” they are an ending that could also be a beginning. They are a chance for further engagement, questioning, and imagination.

This is a great point. Should we really be telling children the world is perfect and everything will turn out okay in the end, or should we prepare them for the scary and sad things they’ll inevitably face as they grow up? Like Amanda, I love an ambiguous ending in horror and it can work brilliantly for a young audience, particularly in YA, but I do think it needs to be handled delicately in middle grade fiction.

Children can cope with a lot more than we think they can and let’s face it, if they’re picking up a horror book they’re asking to be scared. But they’re not asking to be traumatised by hopelessly bleak endings so there needs to be a balance. The final revelation in A Most Peculiar Toy Factory that the mermaid dolls might be cursed is thrilling and spooky but it’s not hopeless, because we know the children can ultimately defeat them like they defeated the teddies. The ‘monster will rise again’ is a common trope in horror, but in middle grade we should at least feel like we’re in with a chance when it rises!

Balancing idealism with realism

The example Amanda offers in her blog post is the bittersweet ending of Dahl’s The Witches. I won’t go into detail because you can read the post over at HWA, but there is an uncertainty and sadness to the climax. The protagonist has defeated all the witches in the country (idealism!) but the threat remains because there are still millions left worldwide that he must destroy (realism). They’ve won the battle but not the war. What’s worse, the protagonist has been turned into a mouse and may only have a couple of years left to live. It’s a heartbreaking end to the story, but Amanda assures us she was thrilled, not traumatised, by this turn of events. As in Bell’s book, although the danger hasn’t been permanently eradicated, the reader doesn’t feel the villains have won, because there’s still hope that the heroes will win the day.

Ultimately, how you end your book is your decision. You can stick to convention or throw the rules out the window. But I would always recommend leaving your middle grade readers with at least a scrap of hope to cling to. They’ve got plenty of time to discover those harrowing horror endings later (Ketchum, Laymon and King, I’m looking at you).

Call to Adventure!

How to use these ideas in your own manuscript

As always, it’s vital to immerse yourself in your genre so be sure to read lots of middle grade horror and pay attention to those endings. Can you find any truly unhappy, hopeless final lines? Again, this is your story and you should tell it how you want to tell it, but if your manuscript ends on an unwavering downbeat key, ask yourself how you might inject some optimism or reassurance for young readers to cling to. Middle grade readers are learning, questioning and forming opinions every day, so consider how you want your book to make them feel about the world around them. You can’t control how they’ll interpret your story but you can give them some hope for the future!

How to write a creepy graveyard in middle grade or YA
 1024 683 Siobhan O'Brien Holmes
By:

Hi there, horror fans! Not much beats the eerie atmosphere of an empty cemetery in the middle of the night, am I right? They’re dark and shadowy, spookily silent and totally empty – you hope!

Everybody knows cemeteries are a breeding ground for ghosts seeking closure (you did know that, right?) but they can still make a fantastic setting for your middle grade or YA story even if you’re not writing supernatural horror. There’s a literary and cinematic heritage attached to graves that acts as shorthand for terror in adult horror culture – think Pet Sematary, Night of the Living Dead, Carrie, The Woman in Black – so they tend to get people shuddering from the offset, even without a paranormal encounter. But that doesn’t mean you should be lazy about it (not that you would – I know you’re not like that).

A flimsy graveyard backdrop isn’t enough to build atmosphere and tension on its own. First you need to be sure it makes sense as a setting in your story (why are your characters there? What does it add to the plot?) and then you’ve got to paint that setting for your readers. Most children and teenagers will have been to a graveyard at some time and they’ll have a picture of it in their mind straight away, so you don’t need to describe every detail. Just give them enough so they can feel the hairs stand up on the backs of their necks and imagine walking through that dark landscape with your characters.

How do you do that? Here are a few tips and resources for fleshing out your middle grade or YA cemetery setting.

Visit a cemetery

The number one port of call when you’re trying to describe a setting is to go there and see it for yourself. No amount of second-hand advice can beat first-hand experience of a location. Walk around and make notes, not just about what you can see but how it makes you feel. You’ll spot things you’d never discover just from looking at photos.

When I was researching for a middle grade novel I was writing, I walked around my local graveyard and noticed how a lot of the graves were grouped together by date or country; there’s one row of headstones, for example, that were all erected in the 1890s – the Victorian patch – and another row where mostly Irish people have been buried. I saw some graves with dead flowers that obviously hadn’t been visited in years, next to gleaming headstones adorned with freshly placed roses. And I always read the names on headstones and make a note of the ones that grab me (not literally – arghhh!). I love the old-fashioned names in particular.

You don’t need to feel guilty about visiting a graveyard for research if it’s open to the public – I often walk around my local cemetery with my toddler because it’s such a peaceful spot – but you do need to be respectful. There may be mourners visiting relatives’ graves or even burial ceremonies taking place, so follow some basic etiquette:

    1. Only attend during visiting hours (these will be posted online or on the cemetery gate)
    2. If you’re going by car, drive carefully. Usually pedestrians and drivers share the same path so go slowly and watch out for people
    3. Don’t stare at mourners or funeral processions and definitely don’t take their photo. It’s never okay to take pictures of anyone without permission.
    4. Give people their space, particularly if there’s a funeral taking place
    5. Keep your voice down so you don’t disturb people visiting friends’ and relatives’ graves
    6. Don’t touch or lean on headstones or pick up items left on a grave. Once, I was halfway out of the cemetery when I noticed my son was carrying a teddy bear. It said ‘DAD’ on its tummy. I was utterly mortified and had to spent the next ten minutes working out which grave he’d taken it from.

Beyond your local graveyard, you can look up lists of the best graveyards to visit in your town or country. For example, here’s a list of the spookiest cemeteries in the UK, and here are five graveyards around the world that offer guided tours. You’ll find thousands more with a quick Google search.

Read The Rural Setting Thesaurus

I adore both The Rural Setting Thesaurus and The Urban Setting Thesaurus and I think every writer should own a copy of each. It lists the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures you can expect to find in almost any setting, and even offers ideas for character interactions and conflict that might occur there. I’ll include a few excerpts here but you’ll need to buy the book to read the section in full!

“

Sights: Wrought iron fences and gates, a paved driveway winding between the graves, a chapel, sun-blanched stone angels, carved headstones (marble, concrete, or granite in hues of white, black and grey), a mausoleum, cordoned-off family burial plots […]

Sounds: Mourners crying or sniffing, people speaking in low voices, whispered prayers, the rustle of dead flowers being removed, the snip of shears, a broom rustling as a maintenance worker sweeps an area clean, lawn mowers, cars and hearses rolling to a stop […]

Smells: Fresh-cut grass, hot stone, newly turned earth, floral scents from flowers left on graves, perfume or aftershave, smells associated with the seasons (crisp air in the winter, rain and rot in early spring or late fall, the smell of new plant growth in the spring and summer)

Sensations: A cold headstone, the thud of one’s shoes against the walkway, heels sinking into the grass, the numbness of grief, a rusty wrought-iron fencepost, chalky dust from a stone marker, dead flowers crinkling in the hand […]

People commonly found here: A graveyard custodian, clergy members, close family or friends, mourners, vandals, visitors […]

”

Watch YouTube

You’ll find tons of YouTube videos that will take you on a tour of a cemetery. Take a look at these for starters:

Listen to music and sound effects

When I’m trying to write an atmospheric scene, I love listening to ambient music or sound effects to help get me in the right frame of mind. If you’re working on a spooky graveyard scene, think about the sounds your characters might hear and pop them on YouTube or Spotify while you write. Here are a few examples to get you started:

Read how other MG and YA authors did it

They’d reached the tip of Cemetery Point. It was a high, rocky spot of land, pounded by the ocean on one side, gnawed by the currents on the other side where the water of the sound met the ocean. A crumbling stone wall enclosed the cemetery. Inside the wall, a crazy dance of weathered gravestones and monuments waited. And just outside it stood Cyndi. She turned and gestured grandly. Beyond her, where the graveyard began, was a huge pile of driftwood

‘Welcome to Cemetery Point’, intoned Cyndi.

The moon went behind the clouds, and the rest of her sentence came hollowly out of the dark. ‘Happy Halloween.’

They stood silently for a moment. Then, ‘Decent’, Dade said, and went forward.

The Cemetery by D.E. Athkins (p30)

What I particularly love in this passage is how blasé the characters are about this spooky cemetery. They’re drunk kids acting grown up, ready to party in a secluded spot: nobody’s prepared to admit they’re scared of a little graveyard. I think this is a great example of the importance of considering how your characters will interact with the setting.

Personally, I’d have been terrified to sit in a dark graveyard at night when I was 16, but I would have found it exhilarating, too – I’m a big horror fan and I still believed in ghosts back then. Unfortunately I wasn’t cool enough to get invited to illegal parties; I had to settle for under-18s discos which were scary in a different way.

There are also some nice phrases in this passage that build atmosphere, like ‘a crazy dance of weathered gravestones and monuments waited.’ I love this idea of the gravestones waiting for the teenagers because it’s gives life to the cemetery and implies something sinister is lurking, ready to pounce. Point Horror gets a lot of flack for its flimsy characterisation and minimalist writing style but they were bestsellers for a reason (I devoured them when I was at school) and if you hunt through the books you’ll find great inspiration for scary scenarios and valuable insight into how children and teenagers might react.

‘Have you ever heard this one? When you drive past a cemetery, you have to hold your breath. If you don’t, the spirits of the newly dead can get in your body through your mouth and then possess you.’

Zach shivered, the hairs along his neck rising. Without meaning to, he imagined the taste of a ghost, like an acrid mouthful of smoke. He spat in the dirt, trying to untested the idea.

‘Ugh,’ Alice said into the silence that followed the end of Poppy’s story. ‘You made me hold my breath! I was totally just trying not to inhale. Anyway, we already passed the graveyard – shouldn’t you have told us the story before we passed it? Unless you wanted us to get possessed.’

Zach thought again about the night before and the feeling of something right behind him, breathing on his neck, something that was about to reach out and grasp for him with its cold fingers. The story was like that, grabbing hold of him and promising that he’d think about it every time he was near a graveyard.

Poppy kept smiling. She made her eyes really wide and spoke in a flat, affectless tone. “Maybe I’m not Poppy anymore. Maybe I didn’t know not to hold my breath and I learned the hard way. Maybe a spirit possessed me and now it’s warning you, because it’s too late. The spirits are already inside yooOOooouUUuu—”

‘Come on, stop,’ Alice said, shoving Poppy’s shoulder. They both began to laugh. Leo laughed nervously along with them.

‘That’s why it’s a scary story. Because you can’t do the one thing that would protect you—you’ll never know if you held your breath long enough or let it out too soon. And you can’t hold your breath forever.’

Doll Bones by Holly Black (p39)

I adore that passage because I grew up on urban legends like this, telling scary stories at sleepovers and trying to scare my friends and younger cousins before bedtime. This is a great example of the associations children might have with a cemetery – evil ghosts waiting to possess you if you come too close. When writing about a group of children in a graveyard, think about how they might try to scare each other and joke around to cover up their own fear. In Holly Black’s scene, the children act as though Poppy’s story is childish and silly, but look at how Zach is affected by it.

Consider how young characters would interact with the setting

Dark, empty cemeteries are unsettling for most people, but children and teenagers will have their own unique reactions to the setting. Think how a twelve year old might feel walking through an empty graveyard, listening to the rustling of the trees and the creaking of signs in the wind. How might a sixteen year old’s reaction differ? Their background will affect their responses: is your main character religious? Has a loved one recently passed away? Do their parents believe in ghosts and often warn them against disturbing the dead? And consider how they got there in the first place. Graveyards are usually locked at night. Did they hide inside while the caretaker closed up, or did they break in? It’s not an uncommon spot for groups of teens to meet up in secret, far from prying parental eyes. Think about how a child or teenager would cope with accidentally being locked inside a cemetery. Would they think it was cool or would they be petrified?

  • 1
  • 2