Scary Stories for Young Foxes: The City is must-read mglit

Scary Stories for Young Foxes was one of our favorite books from 2020. It crackled with tension and age-appropriate scares in a way that classic books do. Using a storyteller as a means of breaking the dire circumstances that mglit characters encounter can be an awesome and effective way to make things real, but also very relatable. It’s also notable that the book did not immediately feel like it led to another one in a series. That’s what’s so surprising about Scary Stories for Young Foxes: The City.

It gives them a new storyteller, characters and turns the simple things in the human world into potentially horrific experiences. Sometimes those things are indeed very scary and present mortal harm to the foxes, and other times it’s the difference in perspective that requires readers to think for a moment as to what the foxes are encountering. However, mglit readers approach The City they’ll be rewarded with an amazing book that doesn’t pull any punches and delivers one of the best fiction reads that this age can experience this year.

The detail that author Christian McKay Heidicker plies into The City is utterly amazing. As the book opens we see a young group of foxes that are hunting in the forest. They quickly meet a wounded, older fox who is bleeding and seemingly near death. This strange new fox proceeds to tell them a story that can be summed up into the fact that grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence. That’s partially because the journey to the other side is ripe with danger, duplicitous animals, a mysterious barn, cold-metallic machines, and humans who are intent on causing them harm.

As the story is told to our young kits it’s a calm menacing tension between how the foxes are describing their environment, and what it really is. The foxes, who are given numbers and not names, yearn for adventure outside of their caged area. The elder foxes tell the younger ones that they’ll have all the adventure that they can handle once they get to the Barn. Because ‘Barn’ is capitalized in their conversations it gives it the appearance of an oracle or some sacred destination that’s unique to their kind. This effect gives the story an otherworldly vibe because you’re never too sure what things are until it’s too late to turn back.

Aspects of The City happen in the big city. The kits smell food and are curious about the lights and movement, but are also wary of the stories they’ve heard. Compared to the forest, this new area has so many more humans, a couple of which are certainly bad for fox kind and a couple that the jury is still out on. The front cover of the book alludes to the mystery and danger that the foxes encounter as they see a dark humanoid following them through a gauntlet of cages and machinery.

One of the foxes on the cover has a bandage on their face. If you read Scary Stories for Young Foxes then you know that Heidicker does a brilliant job at mglit tension. He can create taut situations that play out in slow motion, like when your mind replays an accident that you’ve been in. That same tension exists here; it’s palpable and makes you simultaneously want to turn the page quickly while making your tighten your muscles as you’re doing so.   

The reading level for The City is on par for those fourth-graders who are good readers. Its chapters are also a great length that allows those upper elementary through middle school readers the chance to enjoy reading more. They’re paced very well, balancing information that they provide, making you curious, as well as, just a bit scared of what the characters will discover. Because of the anthology presentation, the book establishes each chapter in a length that builds up to certain set pieces. A couple of times the action ends on a hard stop, with it immediately going to the ‘narrator’. Young readers will love this fact as its akin to Peter Falk’s grandfather jumping into the story as The Princess Bride got to parts of the story that were scary or romantic.

Scary Stories for Young Foxes: The City is a book that sixth-grade ELA teachers could wholeheartedly recommend to their students. It has the real-life sensibilities that other texts they’re recommending, but with a modern, contemporary feel to it.

Scary Stories for Young Foxes: The City is by Christian McKay Heidicker, with illustrations by Junyi Wu and available on Henry Holt & Co., an imprint of Macmillian Publishers.

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