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Help a Reader Out: A Spine Chilling Series for Kids

Nicholas writes:

Hi. I’m trying to find a kids to pre-teen scary book series and having alot of difficulty.. It was a small box set with three or four books, each with three stories. I can’t remember exactly what they were called.. Spine Chillers or something like that I think. One story was about hedge animals that come to life.. Another was about a cursed newspaper route a kid gets from his brother.. Another was about a kid who wakes up to nobody knowing who he is except a mysterious Asian woman.. Any ideas? It was around the Goosebumps days. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

This seems like it should be an easy question to answer, but actually, it’s not. Publishers went bananas with the advent of Goosebumps. They all wanted to jump on that bandwagon! And all of those series lasted for more than three or four books. The series Nicholas remembers could be  Betsy Haynes’ Bone Chillers, M.T. Coffin’s Spinetinglers, or Fred E. Katz’s Spine Chillers. The only problem is that these series told only one story per book. The Midnight Library books by Damien Graves has three stories per volume, but the plots he describes don’t match up to the stories in the books. I shared the information I had with Nicholas, but I’d really like to know if this is a series, what series it is, and I’m sure Nicholas would love to know as well. If any of this sound familiar to you, post a comment, or email me at monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com

Wonderbrary: Where The Scary Series Books Are

I just want to point you to Wonderbrary, a very nice site that lists many of the self-identified horror fiction series for children, for those who have powered through the 90+ Goosebumps books. I’m sometimes asked for this information, and this site has done several posts with the express purposed of identifying these series. Unfortunately it does not appear to have been updated recently, but if you’re looking for information on scary series books published prior to 2011, this provides a nice list, including cover art.

Poison Apple Books Alert! Check Your Kids’ Scholastic Book Club Flyer

In a recent post, I mentioned the Poison Apple Books as a series for the beginning reader who is looking for something spooky. Lo and behold, the books showed up on parent/teacher radar in the November book order from Scholastic. If you are the parent of a child who brings home Scholastic book orders from school, and would like to acquire these for your newly independent reader, they are available as a set in a slipcase in the” Holiday Gift Books” flyer for November 2012 at 55% off (the flyer is a little odd, in my opinion, as it contains both Goodnight Moon and The Hunger Games, but nobody hired me to market to kids and their parents and teachers, either).  A six-pack of  the Goosebumps Hall of Horrors books(which I know nothing about, except that it’s written at a 2nd-3rd grade reading level) is also available at 50% off. Parents are encouraged to order online, where the entire family of flyers for all the book order books at all grade levels are available, but unfortunately these are time sensitive. So if your child did not bring home a book order, you might want to contact the teacher, find out the classroom code, and see what’s available there.