Stories to Keep You Alive Despite Vampires, year-round treat reading

Scary is relative. Sometimes the things that fourth through sixth-grade ages find scary, actually start out funny. Other times those stories are icky, disgusting, or mildly disturbing, but they’re never graphic and usually fun. Stories to Keep you Alive Despite Vampires is kid scary in the best of all possible ways. Ages eight and up know Lemony Snicket, while their compatriots who are a year older are reading it. Despite Vampires is cut from a similar cloth, with a couple more influences that’ll make the book demo just a bit older.

That’s the scare demographic. It’s the hard to pin down age where kids start reading for pleasure and might discover creepy books. Those kids who are on the leading edge of this blade will discover Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Between the covers of those books and the dreadful tales, they’re some of the first age-appropriate horror that upper elementary and middle school readers will encounter.

Stories to Keep you Alive Despite Vampires is by Ben Acker and strikes a solid middle ground between those two tent poles. It starts out with a note that’s been written by someone who’s stuck in a house with vampires. The note suggests that if they want to survive their time in this house that they’re trapped in that they’d best read these stories because vampires like scary stories. They enjoy them because they’re vain creatures who like to read about themselves, the note mentions.

Don’t Stop Be Evil-ing is an example of one of the stories in the book that jumps within the different boundaries of scary and fun. The title is very clever and will make those older readers grin as they hum the song in their head. The story is about a pair of twins who love macabre things. They find a creepy ventriloquist dummy at a yard sale for $1. The two boys know it’s haunted. The wood it’s made of is ancient, its face is a chiseled, disjointed mess that looks like it could start echoing the Donald Sutherland face from Invasion of the Body Snatchers at any moment.

Sure enough, when the boys recreate a spectral situation just before midnight the dummy starts to move, but is it because it’s possessed? It moves again, and there is something paranormal about the dummy. The payoff to that story is great because it elevates the gross factor in a way that’s not too much for parents, educators, or young readers. Oh, that’s cool, but also a little disgusting, I think I’ll read another one, is what those young readers will think.

Some of the vignettes in Stories to Keep you Alive Despite Vampires are shorter than others. There’s a fun short story about a girl with a stomach ache, who gets sick in the most unexpected way that’ll actually make readers grin, grimace or wince their mouths in disgust. The reaction to that story could go in any direction. A couple of the stories are old-soul letters about ghosts that never found their way, but engage in a modern-day side track to scare today’s kids.

The book consists of dozens of short stories that have a couple of different vibes. You’ll read one that’s scarier than average, go to the next one that’s more mysterious or silly and segue into a letter from the kid who wrote the introduction. This is fun, age-appropriate scary stories that kids will read, and re-tell in their own abbreviated way, without giving Acker any credit. At the same time, they’re stories that kids will want to read, and parents won’t mind them reading, which is a great treat any time of the year.

Stories to Keep you Alive Despite Vampires is by Ben Acker and is available on Simon & Schuster.

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