THE CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
"Four of horror fantasy’s newer stars share tales and correspondence . . . A hefty sheaf of chillers—all short enough to share aloud and expertly cast to entice unwary middle graders a step or two into the shadows."
—Kirkus (Starred review)
About The Cabinet of Curiosities
A collection of thirty-six eerie, mysterious, intriguing, and very short stories presented by the cabinet’s curators, otherwise known as authors Stefan Bachmann, Katherine Catmull, Claire LeGrand, and Emma Trevayne, with illustrations and decorations throughout by Alexander Jansson.
Praise for The Cabinet of Curiosities
Accolades
A Junior Library Guild Selection
A Bank Street Best Book of the Year
Selected for New York Public Library’s 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing 2014
Publishers Weekly (Starred review)
“This collection of 36 short dark fantasies . . . aspires to sit on the same shelf as Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and succeeds admirably. Readers who enjoy their Halloween chills all year round will find this anthology a delight.”
Horn Book Review
“The stories are remarkable both for their uniformly high quality and for their distinctness from one another; the abundant atmospherics, including occasional stark black-and-white illustrations, provide a unifying sense of dread. The framing device—the curators send letters from the field introducing their latest discoveries—adds depths of mystery, danger, and idiosyncrasy to a book already swimming in each.”
Shelf Awareness
“Readers will become addicted to these 36 short stories. . . . The book is thick, but the tales fly by. It makes a great read-aloud in bits and snatches for a family road trip, or straight through on a rainy afternoon. Give this to fans of Adam Gidwitz’s Tales Dark and Grimm and Candace Fleming’s On the Day I Died. With school dismissed, it’s time for pure pleasure reading.”
Booklist
“Chilling, thrilling . . . this collection of short stories is arranged through an ingenious conceit: the tales are housed in the imaginary cabinet of the title. Short enough to be read aloud, the book invites comparisons to Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (HarperCollins, 1981)”
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
“For readers who have gloried in and graduated from Alvin Schwartz’s collections of scary stories, the tales collected here will provide a deliciously tingly next step . . . All are engagingly unsettling in some way, with a select few crossing over into genuine nightmare territory.”
Jean Boreen, Children’s Literature
“The individual style of each author gives readers plenty of choices . . . The pencil and ink illustrations throughout underscore the scary and suspenseful element. This is a fun group of short stories and could definitely inspire some great scary stories written by upper elementary and middle school students . . .”