By J. A. White
A boy who loves horror is trapped by a witch, and the one thing keeping him alive is his knack for telling her a brand-new scary story every single night.
Alex loves horror. He writes it, reads it, watches it, until the night he decides his scary stories have only made him a target and takes his notebooks down to the building's basement to burn them in the furnace. On the way, the elevator stops on a floor that shouldn't exist. A door stands open, his favorite movie is playing inside, and a fresh pumpkin pie is cooling on the counter. He eats a slice, and the trap snaps shut. Alex wakes up the prisoner of a witch named Natacha, who keeps a closet full of clothes left behind by children she no longer had a use for. The one thing that makes Alex worth keeping is those notebooks, so Natacha's terms are blunt: a brand-new scary story every night, or he dies. Along with another trapped child named Yasmin, Alex has to outthink the witch and find his way out of an apartment that turns out to be much bigger and stranger than it looks.
This is the scariest book on the shelf, and the one to reach for once your child has worked through the rest and keeps asking for something that will genuinely frighten them. The danger never eases. Alex is a witch's prisoner from almost the first page, and his life rides on whether he can keep inventing. What keeps it from being punishing is how plainly the book loves scary stories, and the children who love them. Alex is clever, he isn't in it alone, and there's a genuine escape waiting at the end.