By Robert D. San Souci
Thirty short, spooky folktales retold from ghost stories all over the world, so your child can have one good shiver before lights-out without starting a whole scary novel.
Robert San Souci went looking through the ghost stories and folk legends of countries all over the world, and retold thirty of the best ones short enough to read in a few minutes each. A headless bridegroom. A ghost who won't rest. A skeleton, a haunting, a bargain with something that should have been left alone. Every tale is complete on its own page or two, gathered from a different corner of the world, so your child can read one spooky story and close the book, or read three in a row under a flashlight. It's the collection for the child who loves being just a little bit scared but isn't ready to carry a whole horror novel around in their head all week.
The bite-sized length is doing double work here: a reluctant reader gets a real, satisfying story in a few minutes, and a child who scares easily gets to control the dose, one shiver and done. Because these are folktales retold, the language is clean and quick, and San Souci notes at the back where each one came from, so a curious child gets a quiet lesson in how the whole world tells scary stories. It's a low-commitment way for your child to discover they actually like reading, as long as what they like is a good chill.