Taylor Hunsberger is a culture writer, poet, and children’s librarian at the East Flatbush branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. She has presented work on the topic of children’s horror literature at the ALA annual conferences in 2024 and 2025 and is the creator of the Hunsberger Scary Scale, a readers’ advisory tool to help librarians get the right scary story into the hands of young readers. Here, she reflects on the ways that horror stories provide children with a vital testing ground to face their real-life fears.
The horror genre has always been a favorite among children and teens. When considering the genre, your first thoughts may go to the teen slashers of the ’70s and ’80s, but if you look further back, horror is fundamental to the literary tradition, particularly children’s books. The majority of the fairy tales we learn growing up contain elements of the horrific and the macabre, and feature a character who is considered an Other. “Hansel and Gretel” contains a witch who wants to eat children and ends with her being pushed inside an oven. Little Red Riding Hood is stalked by a wolf who eats her grandmother. The original “Cinderella” has one of the stepsisters cutting off part of her foot so that it can fit into a shoe. These stories are all gory and frightening, and kids love them!
As a children’s librarian, I constantly have kids asking me for scary stories. There is proof of the popularity of the genre for all ages, yet the genre is not typically seen as a legitimate form of reading for kids. Guardians may view the material as inappropriate because their ideas of the genre stem from their understanding of what horror looks like for adults. For quite some time, horror for kids was seen as too pulpy or not serious enough for younger readers, leading to major backlash during the ’80s and ’90s. This is the same trend we see now in the censorship and book bans throughout the United States. Horror is a genre that gets kids interested in reading, and they should be allowed access to these books just like any other type of censored material.
There’s a wide range of horror for children. Sometimes young readers are looking for a series such as Goosebumps, but sometimes a kid may just want a picture book that features a vampire. They come to recognize these characters such as Frankenstein or Dracula through popular media, which may intrigue them and make them seek out something similar in a new book.
Before working as a public librarian, I conducted research on children’s horror literature for my final graduate project. For this project I analyzed the content of a variety of books in the New York City public library systems, reading all of them and taking note of their unique characteristics. I found a trend that I was not at all expecting: children’s horror is a genre all unto its own. While horror for adults and teens was primarily created for the purposes of instilling fear into its audiences, children’s horror was doing something different. And in this difference, it was presenting opportunities for social and emotional learning for young children.
The primary difference I began to find within these books was that some stories included a monster as a protagonist rather than as a threat to the main character. This was especially true in picture books, early readers, and bridge book titles. The monster in the story was a stand-in for the reader, and the plot typically involved overcoming an obstacle—a journey that is familiar in all children’s literature.
A prime example of this idea is the picture book Gustavo, the Shy Ghost by Flavia Z. Drago (Candlewick, 2020). The story follows a ghost who struggles to make friends, since socializing is his biggest fear. He feels out of place and lacks the confidence to speak to his peers. In the end, Gustavo writes a letter to everyone in town inviting them to his violin concert; they all show up and applaud his talent. Gustavo is a paranormal monster, but in this story he acts as a stand-in for a child reader who may be experiencing the same fear. Just as a reader would do with any other genre, they are able to identify with a monster—the one who is traditionally seen as the Other—and understand that anyone can have the same fears as them. While adult horror presents a story to frighten the reader, this picture book and ones like it use the conventions of a horror story to affirm the feelings of a young person who is learning to grapple with their own set of complex fears. The story remains a safe space to explore their fears.
Kids love horror and the genre has proven to be an immersive and complex opportunity for growth and learning. They deserve to have these stories in their hands, and we should encourage them to read what interests them, not necessarily what satisfies the people around them.
