Bite Risk by S.J. Wills

A compelling blog today from author S.J. Wills about reading stories with the element of danger and fear and why they are so popular.

I remember having two main comfort reads as a child: Winnie the Pooh, and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

It’s easy to see why I might have kept returning to A.A. Milne’s sublimely witty and warm stories – illustrated with genius by E.H. Shepard – when I felt fragile or anxious. But the Ray Bradbury novel is perhaps a less obvious choice.

I borrowed it off my mum’s shelf when I was ten. It wasn’t comforting at first – quite the opposite, especially when Mr. Cooger’s face started melting ‘like pink wax’ on the carousel. But the two boys in the story felt compelled to keep going back, and so did I. Like its sinister mirror maze, the story was magically irresistible.

I really mean that: Bradbury’s writing was old-fashioned and so strange that there were whole passages I could make little sense of. Even so, somehow his hypnotic prose hooked me. I read it with my heart in my mouth.

And the key ingredient: fear.

I was lucky enough that my real life didn’t usually contain much danger, but nevertheless I always felt it waiting for me just around the corner, and I tried hard to keep it away, almost comically risk-averse. I refused to stand on a bench for my infant-school photo because it was too high. When we were shown the public-information film Building Sites Bite, for weeks afterwards, I wouldn’t plug anything in at home, in case I got electrocuted.

So it might seem odd that I would seek out scary stories. But Ray Bradbury was just the beginning – soon every time we went to the library I was on a mission for books with dark covers, spiky lettering, strange shadows and disturbing glimpses of alien tentacles or blood-drenched fangs. They reassured me.

When a story makes your heart pump faster it’s reminding you: you’re alive! There’s a fine line between fear and excitement, and treading that line is energising, strengthening. For children, who can often feel powerless, experiencing that in stories can be revelatory.

In fiction, I was chased by a ferocious creature in the night (Hound of the Baskervilles). I watched a man’s tattoos come to life and show me my own future death (The Illustrated Man). I survived being trapped in a claustrophobic laboratory nightmare (William Sleator’s House of Stairs). I had my brain invaded by alien life not once but twice (Chocky and the Tripods). And I saw it all through to the end.

Having been scared in fiction, I felt braver, and I took some of that resilience back with me into reality.

I often wanted Winnie the Pooh, for sure. But sometimes I needed – still need – the kind of danger I’d never dare get myself into in real life. That’s why I love writing those kinds of books now, because I know I’m far from the only one. Bite Risk is for children and teens who feel the same way I did.

As the narrator says in Something Wicked this Way Comes: “The library deeps lay waiting for them. Out in the world, not much happened. But here in the special night, a land bricked with paper and leather, anything might happen, always did.”