Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to judge a book by its cover. I occasionally see cover art so striking that I want to buy the book just for display, regardless of whether the content is all that good. Christian McKay Heidicker’s novel Scary Stories for Young Foxes is one such book. With expressive and stunning cover art and the promise of similarly styled illustrations for some of the stories, I knew I’d pick this book up just for how pretty it was, and I hoped that I’d end up enjoying the story as well. Luckily for me, Heidicker absolutely knocked it out of the park, and I will feel absolutely no shame placing this front and center on my bookshelf.
Scary Stories for Young Foxes is a collection of eight short stories that are thoroughly interconnected and serve to tell a single overarching tale. Told through the window dressing of a group of fox kits sneaking out to hear scary stories from a nearby older fox, the novel strikes an interesting balance between outright horror and old-time fairy story morality tales. Each of the so-called scary stories is meant to teach the kits an important lesson while still having a distinct “stories around a campfire” spookiness to them. I thought that the individual stories were all very good as self-contained narratives while clearly building toward an overarching tale, and though the “twist” was incredibly clear from almost the beginning of the book, I did enjoy the slow reveal that went on over the runtime.
I was very interested to find out exactly where on the horror spectrum this book would land, what with the title including “for Young Foxes” and all. Particularly with the whole storybook illustration style and the campfire story window dressing, I was ready for this book to be mildly scary but mostly cute. Boy howdy, I was not prepared for what I got. Scary Stories doesn’t pull punches at all, and the first story absolutely wrecked me. The final three paragraphs are pretty much burned into my brain. Heidicker’s ability to scare through describing sounds is absolutely fantastic and really plays into the overall aesthetic of the book. You can imagine a good storyteller making the klikklikklak sound as the flames from the fire jump around them, and even on the page these descriptions just drip with suspense and terror. Not every story really spooked me, but most of them did, and there are a couple that were absolutely terrifying and would feel at home in any horror collection out there.
While slightly less stellar than the spooks, the characters were still very solid. We follow two foxes named Mia and Uly as they are separated from their dens as kits. Over the course of the novel we are shown them growing into adult foxes and experiencing a variety of frights in the process. All of the characters, main and side, felt well distinguished and unique enough to easily discern them from one another. Clocking in at 272 pages and containing eight distinct stories told by a third party to the events, this isn’t the book for you if you’re looking for in-depth character profiles, but I didn’t think the remainder of the book suffered for it.
After a chapter or two, I was ready to complain about how I would have preferred eight totally unconnected stories and how the fact that they were all related to each other would diminish the scariness and impact of the plot. As I read, though, I realized that wasn’t really the type of horror story I was in for. While I enjoy extremely dark stories and generally have found the “no one made it out okay” type of tale to be my favorite, I really enjoyed having Mia and Uly’s story slowly unravel for me. I thought the pacing was fantastic and felt that the breaks for the illustration and quick pauses where the storyteller talks directly to the listening kits were timed perfectly to add suspense. In addition to heightening the mood, I thought that the notes each of the stories ended on, upbeat or dark, were very well planned out and thoughtfully used to impact how I felt while I was reading it. It all added up to a sense of supreme intent and careful construction.
I think that Scary Stories for Young Foxes is great. I had a blast reading it and would recommend it to readers of nearly any age. Not leaning on “adult” themes of horror while remaining dark, scary, and impactful is a difficult trick to manage, and Heidicker pulls it off with aplomb. I would highly recommend giving this book a try, and while I am a devout Kindler would recommend even more reading it in paper to enjoy the fantastic illustrations that are included.
Rating: Scary Stories for Young Foxes – 8.5/10
-Will
