How many chapter books feature the Mark of Satan?
Scott Corbett’s Here Lies the Body.
Okay, so my title question is a little bit rhetorical and a little bit for real:
How many chapter books are out there that REALLY DO feature something that is LITERALLY called the Mark of Satan?
It seems unlikely that Here Lies the Body is the only one, but I’ve read a whole lot of chapter books over the years, and when I turned the page and was confronted with that, I will fully admit that I audibly yelped.
As discussed previously, the 70s were a strange time.
Here Lies the Body
Written by Scott Corbett, illustrated by Geff Gerlach; published 1974
Like The Red Room Riddle, Here Lies the Body is narrated by someone looking back at a scary incident in their past; also as in The Red Room Riddle, it’s told by the more fearful of a pair of boys. In this case, rather than best friends, we’ve got two brothers: Mitch, 15, and our narrator, Howie, who is 11.
Mitch gets a summer job at Hemlock Hill Burial Ground, mowing lawns for $.25 an hour. Howie is planning on tagging along, just for kicks; but is later hired on as well, for a whopping $.10 an hour.
Their mother isn’t super-thrilled about the idea of the boys spending their summer in a cemetery—the brothers who run Hemlock Hill have the long-standing reputation in town for being creepy—but their father pooh-poohs her concerns and overrules her, because it’s The Past.
The boys spend their days at the cemetery—in addition to doing actual lawn maintenance—working on Mitch’s poetry, which bears a striking resemblance to Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies:
Here lies the body of Dudley Duff;
Lightning struck twice, though once was enough.…
Here lies the body of Ebenezer Pratt;
Saw a ghost, and that was that.
He—and vicariously, Howie, who has a serious case of hero worship—is determined to use the names on tombstones as inspiration to make his way through the whole alphabet over the summer; and then, come autumn, wow his parents with a grim-yet-hilarious masterpiece.
But as the summer progresses, as they start to observe more and more weirdness from the Zenger brothers, they get more and more distracted from their goal… and more and more focused on a couple of big questions: WHAT IS THEIR DEAL?? Are they just harmless weirdos… or are they LEGIT SATAN-WORSHIPPING WITCHES????
Guys, maybe I’m just more tuned into this because I’ve gotten old, but Scott Corbett includes way more details about local politics than I’m used to seeing in a chapter book. Ditto zingers about local history buffs and historical societies, which I—and I suspect any other librarians in small towns will feel similarly—TOTALLY appreciated:
Immediately her eyes lit up with a fanatic’s zeal, with the hope that we were about to show interest in some aspect of local history.
The runner about native New Englander culture also made me giggle (and it made me want to revisit John Bellairs, who—if I’m remembering correctly, it’s been a while—also played with that):
My head swam, my pulses raced. It took all I could do to remain as noncommittal as a native New Englander is supposed to remain in the face of pleasure.
…
He came toward us like some Old Testament figure, monumental and menacing, but he spoke like a New Englander—not that some of them are not straight out of the Old Testament.
But what you want to know is whether or not it’s scary, right?
Well. I didn’t read this one as a kid, so I can’t say FOR SURE whether or not I’d have found it scary.
But I’m 99.9% sure that my childhood self would have found the lengthy, two-page description of the torture and murder of Giles Corey to be utterly fascinating and utterly terrifying. Especially when I eventually looked it up—because you know I would have looked it up—and discovered that it was based in fact.
I’m also 99.9% sure that my childhood self would have found the business about the aforementioned MARK OF SATAN equally fascinating.
As we weren’t a church-going household, I wouldn’t have had much of a frame of reference for that, but Corbett provides PLENTY of explanation about devil worship and cults and the idea of a Black Mass and so on. My guess is that, like the stuff about Giles Corey, it would have prompted me to go straight to the library and start looking related topics up.
Which, since kids weren’t—and, unfortunately, in some libraries, still aren’t—always afforded much privacy at the library, very well may have resulted in a Serious Discussion between a librarian and one of my parents.
I’m kind of curious as to how all of THAT would have gone down?
Anyway, it wouldn’t have been just those details that I’d have been happily scared by; it would also have been the overall atmosphere—I’ve always been a sucker for scary stories that largely take place in broad daylight. And it would have been details like how Ezekiel Zenger gets super-cheerful whenever he’s digging a grave; his habit of telling off and trash-talking the person he’s getting ready to bury.
And it would have been scenes like this, in which the creepier of the Zenger brothers clearly—and literally—curses the other one:
It was a terrible thing to say to a man’s face, even a face like Nathaniel’s, and his response was just as terrible. He pushed himself erect with his staff, his eyes red and blazing, and thrust his hand out palm down above Ezekiel’s head in a way that was a frightful travesty of a benediction.
“You miserable clod, you will dig your own grave before ever you dig mine!”
I continue to try to explain to people what it is that I love about horror stories.
Not because I’m trying to win them over, but because they’re so often trying to talk ME out of my love? Or because they’re so often trying to explain that there’s something wrong with me; or lecture me about why I should spend my time differently; or inform me that instead of reading or watching or listening to whatever I have on deck next, that I HAVE to read or watch or listen to A or B or C instead. And even though I know—based on many, many, many previous interactions—that there’s not much point, and that 99 times out of 100, they’re just not going to Get It because they’re just… not, I know that I’ll keep trying. Because I just can’t seem to help myself.
And because, every 100th time, I see a lightbulb go on.
Despite the fact that horror stories have always been with us, one of the common threads in those frustrating conversations is that a lot of people seem to be of the opinion that they’re NEW??
Maybe because everything—in their eyes—that is Bad is somehow NEW? It’s very strange, and I guess I haven’t entirely figured that one out, but it is often coupled with the opinion that “there are no good movies being made nowadays” and “there is no good American television” and so on and so forth, which… well, those are some statements to fling around, I guess. People do have lots of opinions.
Anyway, extremely long story short, this next passage made me so, so happy, and made me feel seen. And because of all of those frustrating conversations, I very much loved seeing it in a children’s book that’s almost 50 years old:
To hear people talk today you would think black humor, or sick humor, or gallows humor—there are lots of names for it—is a modern invention, but it’s always been around, and kids have always loved it. The grislier the better. We grinned at each other like two fiends.
If reading that made you grin like a fiend, well, I see you.
And I am fiendishly grinning right back.
One last thought! You know those lists of books at the beginning of older kids’ paperbacks, like the ones from Yearling and Apple?
The ones that are titled something along the lines of OTHER YEARLING BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY?
Yeah, I used to somewhat trust those.
But now, based on the list at the beginning of this book, I know that they are nonsense.
This list starts out with books by Scott Corbett and John Bellairs.
So far, so good. Solid readalikes.
But then? They must have run out of juvenile horror, because they finished off the list with books that are completely, tonally, out of left field. Like… MR. POPPER’S PENGUINS? THE ENORMOUS EGG?
And so now, of course, I’m dying to know if they recommended Scott Corbett books at the beginning of Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and IF SO, how did young readers respond? And not just the young readers, but their PARENTS???
I feel like mine might have had like 57 heart attacks each if they’d realized that I was reading about chopped-up babies and the Mark of Satan at such a young age.
Now, whatever. They’ve gotten used to it.