Terry J. Benton-Walker and Sarah Henning on Writing Scary Stories for Kids

Tor Books, in partnership with Literary Hub, presents Voyage Into Genre! Every other Wednesday, join host Drew Broussard for conversations with Tor authors discussing their new books, the future, and the future of genre. Oh, and maybe there’ll be some surprises along the way…

I have said this before, and you will hear me say it again during this episode: I wish that I could have had the books that are coming out of the YA sphere now when I was an adolescent and a teenager. When I was growing up, it felt like there were all of the obvious entry points into reading: Goosebumps, The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Harry Potter, but pretty quickly, I, and many of my friends, and I imagine many of you ended up moving on to adult books, maybe even before we were quote unquote supposed to. It has been such a joy as a grownup reader to see the YA space expand in the way that it has.

Too many readers in my life certainly still think of YA a little bit pejoratively. The number of times that I have seen people try to dismiss Sally Rooney’s Normal People as basically ‘YA.’  It infuriates me because there’s this, again, dismissal of an entire genre, certainly, but also of an entire readership. What is so bad about a story that centers a young person? I think maybe a lot of quote-unquote grownups would do better to remember what it was like to be a young person, to have a roil of feelings and hormones and experiences that you didn’t know what to do with, you didn’t know how to process it. You’re just sort of like blindly flying through the world. It’s important to remember that we all experienced that and it’s even more important for kids who are currently experiencing that to see themselves represented in stories.

So as we were putting this year together—and for those of you who haven’t clocked it yet, we have themed each episode of the season this year to be one of the imprints at Tor Publishing Group—I was so excited to get to do a Tor Teen episode.

Not only that, I got introduced to two writers whose work I’m now thoroughly fond of, but who I hadn’t read before. Two writers, who you guessed it, I would have loved to be reading when I was a teenager:  Terry J. Benton-Walker (The White Guy Dies First) and Sarah Henning (The Lies We Conjure).

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Read the full episode transcript here.

FROM THE EPISODE:

Terry J. Benton-Walker: It’s difficult to tell like how spooky is too spooky because I love horror. I’ve always loved horror, and I think my meter is broken. I don’t know when I go too far and I rely on normal people to tell me, but I think what works with. horror for kids is kids can take a lot more than we give them credit for and like, as a kid, I could not quit horror. Like the kids who love it love it even though they’ll watch it and they’ll be terrified and have nightmares and everything else, like they won’t stop. And the scarier it is, the more they like it. One reason I love horror so much is like a lot of the horror, the monsters and the supernatural stuff is representative of some of the real life scary stuff that we go through in our everyday world.

And it’s really nice to see characters that we can relate to growing up against these like larger than life monsters that seem insurmountable. And you know, sometimes they win, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they die very horrible death. But it’s still really cool to see because like we don’t always get to face off against larger than life evil.

Sarah Henning: Yeah. I think kids can handle a lot and that they gravitate towards scary stories because it kind of gives them the sense that it’s going to be okay. Like if somebody can go through this in the, in the book, then they’re fine. My daughter gravitates towards spooky stuff just like I did like. Honestly at the Scholastic Book Fair, I bought another copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. They had like the original artwork, scary, scary, scary. And she took it from me and read it like in a day, you know, when she was like in kindergarten. And I was like, I guess we’ll just see how this goes.

You know, I don’t like being scared, I was the kid that would go to the haunted house and like yell at the performers, you can’t touch me or I’ll sue you. So I don’t, I don’t really like being physically scared, but being able to put yourself in a story and then take yourself out of a scare, I think is a, is a good thing to learn as you’re growing up, I also kind of maybe have a broken meter.

I’m not totally sure sometimes if things are too scary or not. And YA is very, broad in that sense. Like, you know, it can really go pretty deep. Uh, and I love that about it. Like, we’re pretty lucky that we can take it really far and then maybe not have to pull back that much.

Terry J. Benton-Walker: Mm-Hmm.

Sarah Henning: Our audience understands.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.