By Alvin Schwartz
The famous collection of short, creepy campfire tales, the one with the truly nightmarish drawings, so your child can dare themselves through one scary story at a time.
This is the one you probably remember from the school library, the collection of short spooky stories that a whole generation of children dared each other to read. Alvin Schwartz gathered folk scares and urban legends and boiled them down to a page or two each: a scratching at the window, a corpse that comes looking for its stolen liver, a spider bite that isn't what it seems. They're short, they're built to be read aloud, and some end on a jump-scare last line you deliver in the dark. What makes this book its own thing is Stephen Gammell's artwork, wild, dripping, disturbing drawings that are as famous as the stories. Every tale stands alone, so your child can read exactly one and be done, which, with this book, is sometimes plenty.
For the right child, this is the book that proves reading can be a thrill. The stories are so short that a reluctant reader clears one in a couple of minutes and feels brave doing it, and the read-aloud jump endings turn the whole thing into a game you play together. It's a piece of childhood folklore in its own right, the book children have been scaring each other with for forty years. The catch is that it earns its reputation, so it belongs with an older, thrill-seeking child, not a tender one, and the drawings deserve their own warning below.