Eerie Tales from the School of Screams, a macabre all-age graphic novel

School-age children want to be scared. Nay, school-age children need to experience scary, spooky, well-told stories that shake their skin. They don’t need to be able to quote dialogue from some Korean horror film or break down their favorite Saw entry, but they need to see some darkness, even if it’s splattered with music, humor or thought. Eerie Tales from the School of Screams is a graphic novel that oozes with things that go bump in the night. Its thick presence, patient pacing, and varied short stories elicit a variety and genuine dread, with just a grimace of awareness that makes this graphic novel resonate with those aged eight and up.

This is important because age-appropriate horror in a graphic novel is incredibly difficult. In horror, especially books, your mind fills in the blanks and makes things scarier than they otherwise would be. This leads to the thinking that the book is usually better than the movie. That saying is usually true and when it isn’t it usually as an asterisk stating that the movie was “surprisingly good, relative to its source material.” In regards to fiction, the written word is a great medium for horror because of that fact. However, Eerie Tales from the School of Screams is a graphic novel, which, as the genre implies, is driven by its illustrations.

Author/artist Graham Annable has created five short stories that live on their own but are provided an umbilical cord that ties them all together. A chipper, young school teacher is overseeing a group of lower, middle-school students who are each tasked with presenting a scary story to the kids who live in Eerie. Their town name infers that the town takes pride in their spectral image and each child tries to one-up the other as they take their place in front of the class to tell their deadly tale.

The first story sets things up swimmingly with one about an abandoned town by the sea that’s behind on its taxes. This place used to be a well-populated place where dozens upon dozens of people lived. However, there’s also a legend about some sea monsters, sorry sea people, that used to live symbiotically with them until one day when something happened that shifted that relationship forever.

There’s a macabre story about a disembodied head who makes friends with a young girl who lives nearby. She lives with her uncle and aunt who treat her horribly. One day when she’s ordered to fetch some wood in order to heat the cabin this head introduces itself, and things get stranger, and more familiar after that.

As the stories progress, they offer up higher degrees of disgustingness to the enjoyment of middle-elementary through middle-school readers. It’s not the simple style of scares that elementary school readers are used to. It might appear that way, but Eerie Tales gets mighty eerie very quickly. A person on a spaceship gets turned into green, human noodles a la Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Granddad has a monster living above his room that just might somehow be related to his wife, who everyone thinks is deceased. Each story builds up to an even bigger conclusion that establishes the reason why everyone in the stories are, or feel mandated to be creepy.

Annable’s panels also have a repetition to them that builds the tension, as well as, the payoffs when they happen. This occurs in several instances throughout the book, but an early example of this is in The Village that Vanished. The sole occupant of the town is recounting to the tax collectors the morning of when the fish people came on shore. The page is laid out into four equal-spaced horizontal boxes. The first panel has a view looking out the sea with nothing out of the ordinary at all. The second panel has some slightly darker hues in specific parts of the water but is otherwise identical. The third panel has the same sea viewpoint but with five grim-faced fish people emerging from the water. The fourth panel shows the fish people’s faces, some are close up, and some are further away, but that panel consists exclusively of malevolent-looking green creatures.

There’s a slow-boil, patient approach to Eerie Tales from the School of Screams that few graphic novels in the horror genre have accomplished. To an extent, it reminds me of Annable’s earlier work that we enjoyed, Peter & Ernesto. That graphic novel series had a very charming and endearing all-age graphic novel vibe that was centered on friendship and discovery, with a big healthy grin. Eerie Tales from the School of Screams has some of that same DNA, but infuses it with scarier elements. The result is just above a kid’s first graphic novel, it’s a kid’s first horror or scary graphic novel. At no point is it ever too much or too scary for ages seven and up, rather, it’s just enough to make them uncomfortable, then it reassures them, and then it makes them squirm. It does all of this with humor, charm, curiosity and haunted thoughts about ghosts that any kid who is seven and older has had. This is great stuff that will build readers and introduce them to the foundation of excellent storytelling through a medium that they might not have associated with the all-age genre.

Eerie Tales from the School of Screams is by Graham Annable and is available on :01 First Second, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishing Holdings Limited Partnership.

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