The Dangerous Scarecrow

Two children, Jimmy and Stella, spend their summer populating the lonely marsh with companions: two scarecrows they name Mr. Maudsley and Mr. Trask. They breathe personalities into the stiff figures, bestowing habits and histories, imagining conversations in the rustling corn. But as autumn deepens, the children begin to notice their creations have developed habits they never taught them. Something is watching from beneath the burlap faces. Something remembers being loved into being, and wants more. Carl Jacobi, writing in the golden age of American pulp fiction, crafts a quietly devastating tale about the responsibilities of imagination, and the terrifying thinness between the worlds children build and the ones that build themselves around them.