By Jack Chabert
The very first spooky chapter book for a small brave child: Sam finds out on his first day as hall monitor that his whole school is a living, hungry monster.
Sam Graves has just been made hall monitor at Sanford Elementary, and on his very first day he figures out something the grown-ups don't: the school itself is alive. The floors ripple, the hallways stretch longer than they should, the boiler wheezes like it's breathing, and the building is hungry for the children inside it. When a classmate gets pulled into the school's grip, it's up to Sam and his two friends to fight back. The chapters are short, the type is big, and there's a black-and-white drawing on nearly every page, so it feels like a real scary book while asking very little of a new reader.
This is the bottom rung of scary — the book for when your child wants to feel brave but isn't ready for anything that follows them to bed. The monster is a building, the danger is cartoonish, and every problem gets solved by the last page, so the fright is all fun and no residue. It's also a gentle way into reading chapters alone: the pictures carry the story and the type is large, so a child who's nervous about a thick book barely notices they've read one.