The Value of Monster Stories, a guest post by Refe Tuma

Kids love scary stories.

From ghost stories around a campfire to ten-story-tall kaiju wreaking havoc on the big screen, kids want to be led to the furthest edge of their confidence where the electrical charge of fear climbs their spine.

Adults often worry about this impulse. Allowing kids to experience fear goes against our instincts as parents, caregivers, or protectors. Fear is bad. Fear is traumatic. Fear stems from danger, and kids must be protected from danger. Because the danger is real. Monsters are real. Some of us have experienced this reality firsthand, and no one wants that for the kids in their lives.

Yet they keep asking for scary stories. Thankfully, they can handle it better than we think.

Why scary stories?

Scary stories allow us to explore the dangers inherent in the world from a place of safety. Kids need this—we all do. I like to think of it as a form of chase play.

Kids have been pretending to be monsters and chasing each other around for as long as there have been kids. Why? Chase play builds survival skills and demystifies predatory danger. It gives kids a safe way to understand the fear of real threats and to practice escaping them. Physically, yes, but emotionally and intellectually, too. Scary stories accomplish the same thing.

The best stories do double duty, entertaining while illuminating our anxieties as individuals, and as a culture. Godzilla is an exciting spectacle, but it’s also an avatar for the horrors of nuclear warfare. Zombies confront our fear of sickness and death and the potential for danger in every person we meet. Frankenstein invites us to explore our mortality and the ethics we’ve built up around the inevitability of death.

Monster stories, in particular, provide a safe place to explore darkness and danger because the monster remains a step removed from the fear it represents. Researchers have a ten dollar term for this: cognitive impenetrability. It means we can actively enjoy monsters in entertainment while passively benefiting from exposure to the underlying anxiety or danger. Godzilla inspires me to consider the evils of nuclear war without traumatizing me with its horrific reality.

Kids’ brains are still developing. They don’t have the same level of cognitive impenetrability we have as adults, so it’s a dance when writing these stories for middle-grade readers. As an author, I’m forced to continually ask myself how much space I need to create between the monster and whatever reality it might represent.

What makes a monster?

As a literary device, the monster is incredibly flexible. Monsters are the golems into which we pour our deepest fears and anxieties, then set them loose to terrorize us, hoping we’ll figure out how to defeat them. They’re the avatars of our worst impulses—greed, hubris, hatred, fear—and a mirror so we can see them more objectively. Sometimes, they’re also pictures of the redemption we want to believe is possible, suggesting even the worst of us can change.

Anyone can do terrible things, just like we all can do great things. Heroic things, even. We make choices based on whatever moral or ethical framework we adhere to—religion, society, family—and these frameworks usually (hopefully!) keep us from harming one another most of the time. But whenever we choose to act against these basic moral and ethical guidelines, when we choose selfishness or hubris or greed, that is the moment the monster awakens.  

This plays heavily into the arc of my middle-grade debut, Frances and the Monster. When Frances creates her monster, she isn’t trying to understand him. She tells herself she’s performing an experiment for the sake of science, but readers know her motivations may not be so pure. The resulting creature is violent, powerful, terrifying, and—at first—that’s all Frances can see. But as she pursues him, trying to stop him before he hurts someone or gets her into real trouble, she finds clues that challenge her assumptions about the monster. In the process, she questions her motivations, what’s important to her, and what she’s really afraid of.

Monsters as a tool for understanding

Most kids can smell a morality tale a mile away. Most of us, as readers, expect to learn something from a story. We expect our assumptions to be challenged, our worldviews widened, etc. But if we catch the author doing that too directly, it feels patronizing. Unearned. Cheap. I believe kids are even more sensitive to preachiness than we are.

Monsters give us a way to challenge our fear of outsiders and perspectives that don’t match our own without sermonizing. Without lecturing. This goes back to the idea of cognitive impenetrability: while we’re entertained, the learning and challenging and widening of perspectives happen organically in the background. Almost subliminally. It’s a powerful tool because it isn’t just a tool—it’s a valid form of entertainment in and of itself. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Meet the author

Refe Tuma is the author of middle grade historical fantasy books Frances and the Monster and Frances and the Werewolves of the Black Forest (HarperCollins), a finalist for the 2023 Bram Stoker Awards® and the 2024 Page Turner Award. He’s also the co-creator of the best-selling and award-winning What the Dinosaurs Did picture book series (LYBR)—including the upcoming What the Dinosaurs Did on Halloween—which have sold more than 250k copies worldwide. He lives in the Chicago suburbs with his family, two kittens, and his dog Boris. Find more information at www.refetuma.com.

Socials:
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Instagram.com/refetuma
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/refe.bsky.social

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