For the first few days of this year’s Blog-o-ween, we’ve focused on stories featuring monstrous children. Today, it’s time to turn the tables on the adults in the room. Today, it’s time to see how truly monstrous the grown-ups of the family can be. Especially during the Christmas season, and especially when money’s tight. Hey, no one gets a free pass during Blog-o-ween!
Today’s story is by Robert Shearman, and it’s entitled “Granny’s Grinning.”
“Sarah didn’t want the zombie, and she didn’t know anyone else who did.”
“Granny’s Grinning” is set during the Christmas season, as all the best British horror stories seem to be. The toy that is on all the kids’ wish lists this year — Sarah and her four-year-old brother, Graham, included — is a costume. These just aren’t any old kind of costumes. These are costumes of monsters — vampires, werewolves, and, of course, zombies. The special thing about these costumes is that they actually turn you into the creature you are dressed as.
Sarah wants a vampire costume, because, as her friend Sharon Weekes tells her,
“it wasn’t just the obvious stuff like the teeth growing, but your lips swelled up, they got redder and richer and plump, and if you closed your eyes and rubbed them together it felt just the same as if a boy were kissing you.”
And that’s all Sarah really wants for Christmas — to know what it’s like to be kissed. If she’s not careful, kiddies, she just may find out…heh-heh-heh!
Sarah’s family is on the skids, financially speaking. Her father’s business is not doing as well as he’d hoped when he left a more stable position because he wanted to “go it alone.” Unfortunately, the credit crunch came along and put paid to those dreams. On top of the friction the lack of money is causing between her parents, Daddy’s recently widowed mother is spending Christmas with Sarah and her family. Mummy is not happy, but Daddy assures his wife that having Granny over may “work in our favor.” Sarah doesn’t hear the rest of that conversation, and more’s the pity.
Come Christmas, Granny has arrived and is unimpressed with all the work that Sarah’s family has done to make her visit special. That is, until Sarah opens her Christmas gift. Sarah didn’t get the vampire costume like she wanted. She received the zombie. But why does her costume resemble her dead grandfather so much? And why is her family insisting she sleep in Granny’s room that night?
Anything to help the family in times of trouble, amirite kiddies? Heh-heh-heh!
“Granny’s Grinning” is a gut punch of a story. Since we are seeing everything from Sarah’s perspective, the events unfold from a child’s limited understanding of what is really happening. There are clues throughout, however. When Graham wants to be allowed to wear his werewolf costume to the dinner table, Sarah’s mother says, “Fine...they can be monsters then, let’s all be monsters!” When Sarah, dressed as the zombie, sits next to Granny while they watch a James Bond film, Granny tells her the story of meeting Sarah’s grandfather. He was married to another woman, but Granny says, “I just looked at him, and said to myself, I’m having that.” Granny says that “[b]efore I met him, Arthur was a husband. And a father. For me, he became a nothing. A nothing.” As Granny holds Sarah’s hand on the couch, she tells her “You know what love is? It’s being prepared to let go of who you are. To change yourself entirely. Just for someone else’s pleasure.”
Uh-oh! That don’t sound good!
Robert Shearman has written for radio and the stage, as well as the page. He may best be known among fantasy-loving folks as the man who brought the Daleks back to the small screen on Doctor Who. “Granny’s Grinning” was first published in 2009 in an anthology from Ulysses Press entitled The Dead That Walk. Later in 2019, Shearman included it in his own collection of works called Remember Why You Fear Me.
I discovered this story in an anthology edited by Stephen Jones, Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night: 10 Scary Stories to Give You Nightmares! I assumed that this collection was in the vein (pun intended!) of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series or the Nickelodeon television series Are You Afraid of the Dark? You know — good, clean, spooky fun. The book is aimed, after all, at young readers 8-12 years in age.
How wrong can you get?!
This collection is pretty strong stuff for young kids. Heck, it was pretty strong stuff for me! And I loved it!
Another aspect of the book that may make the reader think that he/she/they is reader “kid’s stuff” is the illustrations on the cover and included throughout. One look at the cover, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this book is just trying to be a clone of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and its unsettling artwork by Stephen Gammell. The art of illustrator Randy Broecker sneaks up on you in the best way possible. What seems simple at first becomes intricate, beautiful, and creepy as all get out the more you look at it. When I was a kid, I used to HATE touching scary pictures in books for fear that they’d come to life and bite me. Broecker’s illustrations for Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night pushed me right back into that old childhood fear. And for that I say, “Thank you!”
There’s no audio version of “Granny’s Grinning” that I could find, but please, if you look for it at your local library, do try to get the version that is in Terrifying Tales to Tell at Night. You won’t be disappointed. Besides, I have more stories — and more illustrations! — from this collection on the docket for this month.
Meanwhile...happy reading and...pleasant dreams? Hmmmm? Heh-heh-heh!
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