C. Heidicker: Hi, my name is Christian McKay Heidicker, the, I can't believe I get to say this, Newbery Honor winning author of Scary Stories for Young Foxes. The book was inspired by Berenstain Bears, those classic creepy ones, like Spooky Old Tree and Bears in the Night. I absolutely gobbled those up when I was a kid and I was running this storytelling troop and we were going to put on a Halloween show, so I started to write Berenstain Bears-esque horror stories, but with little foxes. They were completely anthropomorphized and they wore little deerskin boots and walked down the lane to buy apples from Mrs. Duck and everything. And I presented this idea to my agent because I was so excited about it and he listened very patiently and timely and he at the end said, "Okay, so what you've done is you've pulled off a hat trick of publishing no-nos."

Number one, no anthropomorphized animals. Editors hate those. Number two, no short story collections, those never sell. And number three, no scary stories. There's Goosebumps, there's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. They own the market, the end. At the time. I was still so pumped about the idea that I took it and I disassembled it, and considering what my agent told me, I first went through and knocked down all of the walls between the stories so that it became a novel that was told through these vignettes. And I added a little bit of fuzzy coziness for every lash of the teeth just to balance out the horrifying elements. And finally, and I think this was kind of the clincher for what made it really work, I just made the stories as scientifically accurate as I possibly could. And what it ended up becoming was this retelling of all of the most famous horror tropes, but through the eyes of real baby fox kits.

So that a rabies outbreak was a zombie story, and a little old woman who traps foxes and steals their skins and taxidermies them so she can draw accurate representations for her picture books is a witch story, et cetera, et cetera. I set out writing this book with two intentions. First of all, I wanted to scare kids as deeply as I possibly could, and just find that line that was still completely appropriate, but that made them feel a real sense of danger, because those were the books that I always adored when I was younger. I also wanted to shine a light on genuine fox experiences. I think that humans can get very trapped inside their own heads and not really consider the plight that animals go through, so I really loved that challenge of not just writing a story with people that wear animal skins, like the Berenstain Bears. I wanted to make it real and make it convincing.

But as I sank my teeth into the story, I really started to ask myself why we tell each other certain horror stories? What is our obsession with zombies? Why are we so enticed by vampires and witches and tentacled things that lie in the bellies of bodies of water? I really challenged myself to find the beating heart under all of those things, and so even though I was chasing after telling a very wild story about foxes, I ended up connecting to the source of each of these horror tropes. It is interesting that I set out to write about foxes and ended up writing one of the more human things, the most human thing that I've written about so far.