You have the horror of a zombie paw that can’t be escaped.

You have something invisible that’s stealing your children before your very eyes.

After all, once you’ve met the alligator in Kathy Appelt’s The Underneath, what can a Golgathursh do for you? But then everything picks up again at a furious pace. The first tale, “Miss Vix” kicks things off beautifully, but was it possible that the scariest stories would be front and center and then everything would calm down as the book went on? To a certain extent that does happen a little. One concern I had as I read this book was the danger that Heidicker would play his hand too soon. These talesĪre not for the faint of heart. Stories are woven together expertly as Mia and Uly’s tales intertwine, Then we meet Uly, a kit with only three paws, and aįamily so deadly it’s a miracle he’s alive. In one we meet Mia, a kit whose family falls prey to a dangerous Who warns them right from the start that what they are about to hearĬould scare them half to death. They need so it’s down to Bog Cavern they go. For some readers the fact that everyone here sports red fur will make the horrors a little better. Turns out, what terrifies a fox can terrify a child just as easily.

Foxes? How scary can that get? Answer: Hoo-boy. With all that in mind, a book with a title like Scary Stories for Young Foxes (featuring some seriously cute kits on its cover) seems like weak tea in comparison.

Whether it’s Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener, Katherine Arden’s Small Spaces, Tracey Baptiste’s The Jumbies, or Adam Gidwitz’s A Tale Dark and Grimm series, there’s something for every kind of horror fan. Its gradual release on the industry is now allowing new books to sneak through the cracks. How else to explain the popularity of series like Goosebumps or the never-unpopular Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark? Actually, Goosebumps isn’t quite the powerhouse these days that it once was. And book publishers, realizing that kids love scary stories, have turned them into a neat and tidy little industry. At some point in a human life, a little switch gets flipped in the brain and suddenly, instead of dreading that moment at night when you clutch your bed sheets and pull them over your head, you seek it out.

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