Halloween is almost upon us, and my newest picture book, Halloween Forest, is on the shelf.

When I received my first copy with John Shelley's marvelously creepy illustrations of the forest of bones I'd written about, a rather delicious shiver ran down my spine. All those bony tree hands reaching … reaching.

And my own shiver brings up an interesting question. What is the point of scary for kids? 

The question carries me back to another book and a very specific child. When my son, Peter, was a toddler, he had many books to choose from, but for some months he returned over and over to one I now remember only vaguely despite my being the perennial reader. (Obviously the book didn't impact me the way it did Peter.) I've forgotten the title, the author, even the plot. The story, I think, took place in a zoo, but I'm not entirely sure even of that. 

What I do remember distinctly was that on one turn of the page, a bear appeared. A very large bear. And every time we came to that bear, Peter, cuddled into the safety of my lap, vibrated with terror … and total fascination. He covered his eyes, his body a tense little ball, and peered at the bear from between his chubby fingers. 

Nonetheless, each time we finished the book, the bear safely tucked away in the closed pages, Peter asked to have it read again … and again … and again!

There is a name for Peter's experience. Aristotle came up with it long ago. “The purging of pity and fear.” Peter delighted in being frightened because it gave him a chance, in the safety of his mother's lap, to conquer his fear. In order to conquer fear, however, a little boy has to feel it first. And that was the function of that book and of that bear in his life … to allow him to discover that his own fear didn't destroy him.  Each new reading gave him a chance both to be afraid and to rejoice in his own bravery. And each time he emerged from the book a step closer to being the big boy he so wanted to be.

We all need bears in our stories. We need Halloween and perhaps even bony trees with deliciously reaching hands. We need, from time to time, to face fear—and loss and unfulfilled longing and loneliness and despair—to move through those all-too-human feelings and to emerge on the other side wondrously intact. And then we need to move on with our lives, a bit braver, a bit wiser, a bit more compassionate toward ourselves and the world than we were when we picked up the book.

That's the way story works, and that's what Aristotle was talking about.