Scary Stories for Young Foxes

Although the kits’ mother warns them not to go to the Bog Cavern, she is well aware that by forbidding them, she is only tempting her children to sneak out and seek to hear the storyteller’s tale. It can therefore be deduced that she wants her kits to hear this story because she anticipates that they will learn valuable lessons from the storyteller. There is foreshadowing in the storyteller’s warning that those foxes who do not remain until the end of the story will be doing themselves a disservice by leaving; this warning also prepares the reader to note which kits manage to demonstrate the most bravery by listening to the very end of the tale.

As their stories unfold, Mia and Uly serve as foils to each other in some ways, for they each experience opposite examples of the kinds of family life that young foxes (and, by implied extension, young human children) might have while growing up. Although Mia teases her siblings, there is no animosity in her relationships with them. Similarly, she and her siblings receive their mother’s love and care and Miss Vix’s attention and kindness; these two vulpine “adults” play the role of responsible guardians who nurture the kits and ensure that they grow successfully to maturity. Until their brother Alfie unexpectedly contracts rabies, the kits have never experienced any kind of tragedy or adversity; therefore, they are completely unprepared for the life-or-death crisis that ensues when Miss Vix, their deeply loved teacher, also contracts rabies and transforms from a trusted guide into a dangerous adversary determined to kill them outright. Confronted with their own mortality, the kits fall prey to this shift in circumstances, and many do not survive.

Their protection from pain and conflict up to this point makes it difficult for Roa to process what is happening to their teacher; faced with something so far outside his experience, he tries to fit it into a known schema and initially believes that his teacher might be manufacturing a feigned crisis as a teaching opportunity. Soon enough, the kits are forced to realize that their situation is genuinely perilous, and the author makes it a point to convey the intense fear and betrayal that the young foxes experience as Mia is the only one to escape a truly unthinkable fate.

It is significant that she finds herself relying upon Miss Vix’s lessons to evade and hide from her deranged teacher, and in a classic example of the traumatic reversals for which the horror genre is known, the frightened kit must turn against the very person who gave her the tools to protect herself and leave her siblings behind for self-preservation. Thus, this first harrowing scene demonstrates the author’s larger philosophical purpose: that of providing children with the psychological tools to handle sudden, traumatic situations. Similar situations might appear in the lives of young human readers should they ever have occasion to experience the onset of severe mental illness in themselves, their friends, or their loved ones. Many real-life situations can compel a child’s guardians to suddenly behave in frightening, threatening ways that seem to defy reason, and while this tale might be unsettling to young readers, it also serves as a constructive way to convey the essential lesson that even the most stable elements of one’s life do not always remain stable. For example, certain medical conditions, such as dementia or traumatic brain injury, can affect one’s cognition and impact personality, turning a familiar loved one into someone that a young person is not equipped to recognize or understand. It is the author’s deliberate choice to engineer a situation in which Miss Vix changes through no fault of her own, for this creates a believable analog to real-life crises even as it compounds the tragedy of the character’s infection and death. Thus, right from the start, the author uses Horror as a Teaching Tool for Young Readers.