50 pages • 1 hour read
Alvin SchwartzScary Stories To Tell In The Dark
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Middle Grade | Published in 1981A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Other Dangers”
Part 4, Story 20 Summary: “The Hook”
After a movie, Donald drives Sarah, his date, to the top of a hill on the outskirts of town. However, a news bulletin on the radio says that a murderer, armed with a knife, has escaped from a nearby prison; moreover, the killer has a hook in place of his missing left hand. Sarah insists that they leave, much to the annoyance of Donald, who says that they’re perfectly safe up on the hill and that “[g]irls are always afraid of something” (62). As he starts the car, Sarah thinks she hears a scratching noise, like “somebody […] trying to get in” (62), but Donald scoffs. After driving her home, he declines her invitation to come inside for cocoa. When he walks around the car to open her door, however, he finds a hook hanging from the door handle.
Part 4, Story 21 Summary: “The White Satin Evening Gown”
A young woman, too poor to afford a fancy gown for the formal dance that she has been invited to, tries a pawnshop, where she finds a white satin evening gown that looks lovely on her. At the dance, she attracts all eyes and has a wonderful time, but as the evening wears on, she feels dizzy and tired. Thinking that she has danced “too much,” she asks a friend to take her home. The next morning, her mother finds her dead in her bed. An autopsy reveals the cause of death to be poisoning by embalming fluid, which must have entered her skin from the satin gown during the exertions of dancing. The pawnbroker confesses to having bought the gown from an undertaker’s assistant, who apparently stole it off the body of a young woman just before she was to be buried.
Part 4, Story 22 Summary: “High Beams”
A teenage girl driving home from a basketball game after dark notices that a pickup truck has followed her out of the parking lot and is driving close behind her. This does not bother her until the truck’s high beams come on, “flooding her car with light” and staying on for almost a minute (67). Worse, when she exits onto a little-used road, the car follows, still flashing its high beams on and off. She cannot get away from it: When she guns her engine, the truck driver does the same, until she feels on the verge of panic. Finally, when she reaches her house, the truck pulls into the driveway right behind her. Running into the house, she shouts at her father to call the police. Outside, a man emerges from the truck while holding a gun. However, when the police arrive, the man gestures toward the girl’s car, yelling, “You don’t want me […] You want him” (67). In the car, a man with a knife is huddled directly behind the driver’s seat. After the man is arrested, the driver of the truck describes how he saw the man sneak into the girl’s car just before she drove out of the parking lot. With no time to call the police, he followed in his truck to protect her, switching on his high beams whenever the intruder reached toward her with his knife.
Part 4, Story 23 Summary: “The Babysitter”
Doreen, a teenaged babysitter looking after four children, hears the telephone ring at 9:00 pm, but before she can say hello, a man laughs hysterically and hangs up. She decides it was just a “nut,” but at 9:30, the phone rings again, and this time, the man says, “I’ll be there soon” (70). The man calls again at 10 o’clock and then at 10:30, at which time Doreen, very frightened, calls the operator, who tells her that the next time the man calls, she’ll trace the call. At 11 o’clock, the man calls and says, “Very soon now” (71). The operator, tracing the call, tells Doreen that it’s coming from the upstairs phone and that she needs to leave the house immediately. As Doreen herds the children toward the door, a strange man comes down the stairs after them. Luckily, the police arrive just in time to arrest him.
Part 4 Analysis
“Other Dangers,” the title of Part 4, refers to scary stories that, though not rooted in superstition or the supernatural, are almost as fanciful as the other stories in the book. Though events similar to the ones in these stories may have happened to real people, the stories themselves have been passed around for decades, with the details always changing, and most folklorists now regard them mostly as tall tales founded in “what-if” anxieties about the modern world and its dangers. Popularly known as “urban legends,” they are usually told as “true” stories, sometimes as having happened to a “friend of a friend” of the teller. These stories highlight The Impact of Setting in Horror Storytelling, as they transform everyday places and occurrences into scary situations.
“The Hook,” one of the most enduring of these modern myths, concerns a teenage couple who has a terrifyingly close call at a lover’s lane. As in “Cold as Clay” and “The Guests,” their terror is retrospective, felt only after the danger has passed. This story is thought to date from the 1950s, when millions of teenagers began to own cars for the first time. Inevitably, with this new freedom and independence came equally modern fears and vulnerabilities, such as being caught in a lonely place far from home.
The poisoned dress in “The White Satin Evening Gown,” despite its ancient antecedents, likewise reflects relatively recent fears about a modern world that has gotten too big—where many of us don’t know the true origins of the objects we use in our daily lives. Here, the young heroine unwittingly dooms herself by wearing one of these dubious products (a pre-owned dress) right up against her skin. In an age when very few of our daily goods and necessities are manufactured, farmed, or cooked by people we know—and may even come from thousands of miles away or from the hands of criminals—almost everything we touch, the story warns, has the potential to be tainted and dangerous.
“The Babysitter,” a chilling tale popular at slumber parties, exploits this same (modern) fear of not knowing the true origins of something—in this case, a phone call at night. Again, the story’s setting (a suburban house) offers a false sense of security: As in “The Hook,” a seemingly safe enclosure with locked doors threatens to become a deathtrap. Similarly, much of the terror unfolds in hindsight, as the babysitter belatedly discovers that a dangerous killer has been lurking for hours just above her and the children she has been watching.
“High Beams,” yet another tale of a teenager in peril, resembles “The Hook” in its claustrophobic setting: a car menaced by an armed attacker in a lonely place at night. As in “The Babysitter,” the killer turns out to be much closer than the heroine knows—in the seat right behind her—but “High Beams” also misdirects the reader with an apparent menace (the man in the truck) who turns out to be the story’s hero. In “The Babysitter,” the same modern technology (the telephone) that precipitates the story’s terror eventually saves the day by summoning the police; likewise, in “High Beams,” cars play the double role of deathtrap and savior. (Similarly, in “The Hook,” the car radio warns the teenagers of the escaped murderer, saving them.)
With the exception of “The White Satin Evening Gown,” the stories in Part 4 seek mostly to reassure, telling us that the big, modern world may be a harsh and dangerous place, but it usually extends a safety net as well. Of course, the fact that these “true” tales are often credited to a “friend of a friend” might also explain the happy endings: The “friend,” after all, has to survive to pass on the story.
