Invasion of the Marshmallow Shadows

by Stephanie Black

My three-year-old daughter has discovered monsters. She’s sometimes leery of going into rooms by herself. She wants me to sit outside her room in the hall while she’s going to sleep. She gets upset if she wakes in the middle of the night and sees that someone has closed her door. Sometimes she wants the light on during her nap. It’s daylight, but that’s not good enough.

For a while she was terrified of “marshmallow shadows”. She watched a PBS kids’ show where the characters were roasting marshmallows around a campfire and a monster showed up, or something like that—I didn’t see the show, but my older kids reported on it. I don’t think it was supposed to be particularly terrifying—it’s a preschooler’s show, after all—but for days after that she was scared of marshmallow shadows. Then there’s that popular monster hangout—bad dreams. Thankfully, she hasn’t seemed to have many bad dreams, but she did have one with a green and black monster.

Poor kid. I keep trying to tell her monsters aren’t real, but she probably thinks I’m a kook. What do you mean they aren’t real? I saw one on TV. And it probably doesn’t help that it’s Halloween time, with spooky monster decorations all over the place. She doesn’t like her brothers’ Halloween costumes, both of which represent spooky, black-robed skeletal creatures.

Imagination is a marvelous thing, but it can be overwhelming when you haven’t yet figured out what’s real and what’s not. I hope that soon—before she drives her sister/roommate bonkers—my preschooler will outgrow her monster fears. But I also hope her imagination will remain active enough to allow her to enjoy a good story.

Without imagination there wouldn’t be any fiction. We novelists are doing our best to engage the emotions of reader in stories that never happened to people no more real than marshmallow shadows. How many of you out there avoid reading horror novels because they creep you out too much? Why do they creep you out? Whatever paranormal menace is menacing the populace doesn’t exist outside the writer’s imagination. You’re a logical person. You know that. But if the story is well done, you get the creeps because it feels real. And you can blame Jeff Savage for your nightmares.

Imagination keeps people glued to a book. I’m always thrilled when I hear someone was up until three o’clock in the morning reading my book. Why was the reader willing to lose sleep to find out what happens to people who don’t exist who are threatened by villains who come from the same Never-Never Land as the monsters lurking in my daughter’s bedroom? Imagination.

Boo!