Tana French’s new novel, The Searcher, came out, and I’m also reading Memphis Mayhem by David Less, so I am woefully behind on the YA book I’m supposed to be reading and reviewing for this column. With that in mind, I thought it would be entertaining to take a brief stroll down memory lane. How did I become the kind of person who regularly has at least two books going at any given time?
Well, my mother broke several rules of good parenting and gave me a book I wasn’t, based on the suggested age range, old enough for and that would surely give me nightmares. (Thanks, Mom.) That book was R.L. Stine’s The Werewolf of Fever Swamp, No. 14 in the Goosebumps series, and trust me when I tell you that my mother’s play paid off.
Werewolf of Fever Swamp
See, I was lucky in that my parents read to me as a young child. I was a fool for dinosaur and nature books, and I think my dad may have harbored the illusion he was fostering an interest in science. So my parents, worn out from long hours at the airport, where my baggage handler father used to gobble up all the overtime he could get, would end most nights with an entry or two from one of my books on dinosaurs. Frankly, it was a pretty sweet setup, and I saw no reason to mess with a good thing. I could read, sure, but why waste time with chapter books? Dad didn’t want to fool with ’em, Mom was trying in vain to get me interested in classics like Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, and I was happily enjoying a system of great rewards (dinosaur books, Dad struggling to pronounce Latin names) for almost no work (they did the reading — and the laborious task of pronouncing words like Pachycephalosaurus).
I think if my folks hadn’t gotten divorced, I may never have learned to read above a first grade level. But once I started spending all my weeknights at my mom’s house, I had to learn to live under a new regime. If I wanted stories, I would have to read them myself. Fine, I thought, I could live without books. They were great, sure, but I could get my dinosaurs and animals fix in other ways. David Attenborough did have a television show, after all, so why get worked up?
Luckily, my mother was crafty. One thing about being a relatively new reader is that you can be wowed by old concepts. To most literate folks, werewolves are old hat. But to the kid who had seen The Monster Squad an alarming number of times and who was struggling to be interested in Tom Sawyer, The Hardy Boys, and other more wholesome content, the idea of a werewolf loose in a Southern swamp was alluring in the extreme.
“This one has werewolves,” Mom said (or something like that — I’m paraphrasing) while looking over a Scholastic book fair pamphlet. “If you don’t think you’re too young to read about something like that. It might give you nightmares.” In retrospect, it’s obvious. I got played. My mother and I had fought an ongoing battle over the subject of my literacy, and after a long and mostly successful campaign, I surrendered utterly.
I’m sure that slim book would seem like complete dreck if I were to thumb through a copy these days, but I went from a half-finished copy of Frog and Toad directly to Fever Swamp, with no stops in between. I had no idea, before then, that fiction could be interesting, that books for children might contain at least the illusion of peril. Where was the toad eating cookies, the frog sipping tea? I’ve never looked back.
A year or two later, I left the library with copies of Brian Jacques’ Outcast of Redwall and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot. They’re both classics, but they’re also pretty bloody. Again, I was probably just a little bit too young for them, but that only made me want to prove myself. “Are you sure you can finish these by the time we have to return them?” That sounds like a challenge, Mom. Challenge accepted.
Thank you to Cotton Tails, the place to find unique children's clothing and shoes, found in the Laurelwood Shopping Center, and Literacy Mid-South for sponsoring this children’s book review! Learn more about the various programs offered by Literacy Mid-South by visiting their site literacymidsouth.org and follow them on Facebook and Instagram @literacymidsouth.