The Darkest Corners of the Library

Vol. 180: My Childhood in Horror and True Crime

Dec 02, 2025

For the last ALH post of 2025, I’m bringing you a guest post I wrote for SoNovelicious a few years ago. Each post of that Substack looked at a different aspect of reading and writing and featured guests discussing genres. When my post was published and I read the host’s commentary, it confirmed what I’d always suspected: I had a strange childhood. But all of this is true.

Many people can tell you when they first encountered a subject that would become a lifelong interest. A museum visit begins a love of art, or attending a sporting event leads to joining a team. My first experience with horror is just as vivid.

When I was four, my teen babysitter discovered that the 1958 Vincent Price classic The Fly was airing on tv that night and insisted we watch. I did not want to watch The Fly. Few four year-olds would. The plot involved a brilliant scientist who gets trapped in his one-of-a-kind DNA-melding machine. But he wasn’t alone, a housefly was buzzing around in there too. The machine works, dammit, leaving him with a fly’s head and hand. That wasn’t so hard to take. Even at that age I knew the actor was just wearing a mask and glove. If this was the worst of it, I was a-okay! I made it to the end of the movie, and that’s when the filmmakers unleashed hell.

Vincent Price is standing in a lovely garden, and like the viewer, he thinks the horribleness of having dealt with a best friend-sized fly is done, but then he hears a tiny voice squealing “Heeelp me! Heeelp me!” He searches the bushes until he finds the source: the fly that had been trapped in the machine with his friend is now trapped in a spider web. It received the man’s mind and voice, and most gruesome, his ghostly face that watches as the hungry spider is descending on him. Price can do nothing more for his friend than frantically pick up a rock and kill both creatures. Thanks, shitty teen babysitter whose name is long-forgotten. I’ve spent my life screaming at spiders.

My first experience with reading horror is one many of you can relate to, as it began with my school’s Book Fair Day. Each kid was given tickets and unleashed in a room of tables covered in books. This was before Amazon, back in the days when a child had three sources for books:

1. The school library. I’d read everything interesting twice already.

2. The public library. I ignored the children’s books and was getting chased out of the WWII section by the librarians.

3. Parent’s nightstands. Almost a guarantee of finding confusing novels by someone named Sidney Sheldon.

We redeemed our tickets for free books, and this was how I met Alvin Schwartz and his Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark series. And, sweet smokin’ Jesus, they were scary. Here were tales with titles like “Dead Man’s Brains” and “The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers”. There was “The Big Toe”, which was a staple of storytelling in my group of neighborhood kids, always told because moaning the refrain of “Where is my tooooe, give me back my tooooe…” is too satisfying to resist, but we made it our own by having the nine-toed entity chasing the thief around the neighborhood. Our neighborhood.

And then there was “The Hearse Song”. Every kid knew a version of it and we’d dance around the babysitter’s backyard singing, “Don’t ever laugh when the hearse goes by, because you’ll be the first to die!” If you think I’m exaggerating, let me assure you, I’m not. We all knew “The Hearse Song” and we loved to bellow it until an adult told us to shut up. It was so baked in that I knew the song before I ever picked up a Schwartz book.

We were children who sang about “pus pouring out like whipped cream” while the babysitter handed out bologna sandwiches. I’m not sure if this was happening across America or if I was growing up among especially morbid playmates. I believe we loved these horrifying stories and songs because lots of children love the anti-social. As we get older, I think it has something in common with speeding, or perhaps, swimming with sharks. It makes your pulse race. You can read a scary book or watch a horror movie, lose yourself in a good story and get that jolt of adrenaline, and then go about your day feeling like you’ve survived.

True crime is something of a sibling to horror. Terrible things happen in both, but with true crime, you have less chance of meeting vampires. Note that I said less chance, not no chance. People are strange.

As with horror, my initial experience with true crime came in childhood. My babysitter was murdered. Laurie watched me no more than twice, so I won’t claim that we had a friendship, but she lived nearby and had gone to the same elementary school I was then attending, and the same middle school and high school I would eventually attend. I would go through many of those school years with her younger brother.

My vivid memory of her is of a smiling teen who arrived at my house without the threatening aura that even my older sister took on when anticipating that she would be left in charge. Laurie sat on the living room floor with me and worked on one side of my coloring book while I filled in the other. We talked and colored, and at one point she told me I was smart. Compliments being thin on the ground in my house, I became silent because I didn’t know how to respond. She told me it was okay. Soon after, she was gone.

For all my research into other murders, this is one that I haven’t gone near. I know the basics of it and where it happened. It was in the papers and my regular weekday babysitter talked like she was responsible for a news cycle all on her own. The murderer was convicted. My only research has been to make sure I spelled Laurie’s name right. I don’t want the details.

Something like that would send a lot of people running the other way from these subjects, but I’m a contrarian. When I see a trend emerge, I cross my arms and wait it out. I can wait a long time. Eventually I’ll get around to seeing this Jurassic Park I keep hearing about.

I discovered the true crime section of our public library in middle school. That this smallish library had a true crime section tells me that I missed the chance to become friends with whomever was responsible, but it included the old Great Cases of Scotland Yard books by Eric Ambler. These two volumes, first published in 1978, were a goldmine of murder. This is where I met Jack the Ripper (still a favorite) and timid Dr. Crippen. John Haigh, aka The Acid Bath Murderer, and Thomas Neill Cream, who looked like a million bucks with his top hat and walrus mustache, but behind the facade was a monster. For some reason, I loved reading about horrible people.

Becoming a teen, I leaned even more towards the darker stuff. I leaned hard. It wasn’t enough to wear black eyeliner and black lipstick, no, I went ahead and scared my freshman English teacher with an oral report about the Jack the Ripper case. I thought it was an interesting subject that no one else would pick, and was I ever right. By the time I got to the murder of Mary Kelly, my teacher was cringing and told me to skip it. I had emphatically sealed my reputation as a weirdo.

The adult me recognizes that it’s an interest in psychology, a “why would anybody do that” question that hangs over the entire subject of true crime and much of horror. I don’t enjoy reading about suffering, in fact, I hate the person who causes it. The need to see the perpetrator punished is a driving factor, and when the guilty haven’t received their punishment, it’s insulting to our need for fairness. That’s why heroes like Michele McNamara, Paul Holes, or your local detectives, spend years of their lives looking for answers. The thing about true crime is that there’s a very long list of criminals, but an even longer list of people willing to bring them to justice.

Autumn Lives Here

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?