It wasn’t anything she intended to do, of course, but one day, after school, Ollie encountered an odd woman on the cusp of chucking an old book into the river.
Maybe that’s why she stole that woman’s book.
After her mom’s death, Ollie has consistently lost herself in novels of every stripe, shutting out the world around her. For Ollie, books have always been her escape. When you lose someone close to you, you find a way of dealing with the pain. We all deal with trauma in different ways. Are you afraid of scarecrows? No? Well bad news, bucko. Then I read a book that’s going to be absolutely perfect for those kids that loved Stranger Things and want something in the children’s room of the library that feels like that. It’s been a long time since I’ve found something that really made me nostalgic for those days of yore. All this is to say that I like to think I know my way around a scary book for the 9-12 year old set. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark worked for me, if only because the stories themselves were just lame urban legends, while the art by Stephen Gammell was synthesized, purified nightmare fuel, perfect for sleepovers. I remember distinctly picking up some rando Alfred Hitchcock story collection for kids and reading the warning that it would be the scariest thing I ever encountered, only to return it to the library without going any further. I wanted to be scared, but in the safest way imaginable. They were written by folks like Betty Ren Wright and Willo Davis Roberts and Mary Down Hahn, and I loved them dearly. The Apple paperbacks had titles like Ghost Cat, and Wait Till Helen Comes, and The Dollhouse Murders. But it was also long after John Bellairs made it his business to truck in the middle grade supernatural. This was long before Bob Stine decided to slap an “R.L.” in front of his last name and stake a claim in the world of G-rated horror fare. Only one thing that could make my little heart go pitter-pat, and that was the comforting presence of ghost stories. There was only one thing in the entire world I ever wanted to read, at that point. In fourth grade I sold my soul to the Scholastic Book Club’s Apple paperbacks.
Putnam & Sons (an imprint of Penguin Young Reader’s Group)
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