Setting a Spooky Scene: The Foggy Night and Fairy Tale That Inspired Small Spaces

In the spring of 2017, I took a Megabus from Burlington, Vermont, to Boston. I was really excited because I’d paid five extra dollars to have a seat on the upper floor, right in front. I meant to spend the entire ride staring out at the open road, daydreaming.

Naturally, it was foggy.

I couldn’t see beyond the bus’s headlights. So much for the open road. At first, I was annoyed at the waste of my five dollars. Then, staring glumly out at this blanket of fog, I started to wonder: What if our bus broke down? What if there was something lurking in the mist? What if it came out?

Taken with this horrifying notion, I got out my notebook, scribbled a few ideas, and promptly forgot about the whole incident. But then, in July of that same year, I found myself bored on a hot Sunday afternoon. I started paging through my notebook and I saw the entry about the scary fog on the bus ride to Boston. I started to think.

When I was a kid, I had a strange relationship with scary stories. They terrified me, yet I loved them. I adored R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps — even though I could only read those books in short bursts because I would get too scared. But, unable to tear my eyeballs away for long, I still read every single book in that series.

Trying to stave off boredom, that hot afternoon in July, sitting in the sun with my notebook on my lap, I started thinking about all the spooky stories that used to keep me up at night.

One particular story came to mind. It wasn’t, I think, a horror story per se, but it certainly frightened me when I was about ten. It was a Japanese fairy tale called “The Boy Who Drew Cats.” The orphaned boy hero of this story lives in a land haunted by demons. His mother’s last words to him are: “Avoid large places at night. Keep to small.” So, on his own, the boy finds a small space to hide in every night, which is the only thing that keeps him safe from the demons. Eventually, the cats of the title come to life and save the boy and the country.

I used to listen to this story on a cassette tape on the way to school. And every time, without fail, when the narrator repeated this simple, chilling piece of advice — “Avoid large places at night…” — I would shiver.

Thinking about it nearly 20 years later, I wondered if this fairy tale advice could be used in a different kind of scary story. I have always loved creating atmosphere in my books. A scary children’s book, I decided, was the perfect place to play with atmosphere, because you have to use it for the scares. Gore and violence aren’t appropriate; you have to create a sense of dread.

Could I do that, I wondered? Could I spook other kids the way R.L. Stine and Mary Downing Hahn spooked me?

I decided to try.

So with a lot of eagerness and no clear idea of how it would turn out, I embarked on writing a scary children’s book. For the book’s setting, I didn’t have to look any farther than the leaves, the mists, the sudden wind, and progressively shortening autumn days of my home state of Vermont.

The book that became Small Spaces draws not only from the scares of my beloved Goosebumps, the fairy tales I loved as a child, and the autumn atmosphere of my home state, but also from the portal fantasy that I loved growing up. Sharp-eyed readers will detect references in Small Spaces to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and The Wizard of Oz, among other books.

I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed remembering the cadence, voice, and phrasing of the books I loved as a child, and putting myself back into the mindset of my 12-year-old self. Writing a book set in my home state was a delightful change of pace after my adult books, which are set in a fairy tale version of medieval Russia.

I would not have predicted that this story would have blossomed into a novel, still less that it would be published, nor that it would be part of an ongoing series. But to my surprise — and delight — all of that is true.

I hope you and your children will come along with me, to Vermont, on a cold evening in October.

Avoid large places at night.