Be Afraid!: Tales of Horror

Anne Hutchings, a former elementary-school teacher-librarian with the
Durham Board of Education, is an educational consultant.

Horror stories remain extremely popular with young adult readers. Be
Afraid! contains enough stories of the macabre, the bizarre, and the
just plain weird to satisfy even the most avid reader of the genre.

This collection of 14 short, well-written stories by such authors as
Monica Hughes, Ed Greenwood, and Tim Wynne-Jones features several
stories involving ghosts and other supernatural beings. Other stories in
the collection deal with more everyday, contemporary themes. While many
of the selections are relatively innocuous, others lean toward what
might be considered more “mature content,” such as “The Witch of
the Dawn.” The recent incident in northeastern Ontario in which a
student was jailed because of a story he wrote for a school assignment
might even lead some readers to deem the last selection in the book,
“To Be More Like Them,” inappropriate.

An individual’s tolerance for scary stories is difficult to determine
and can vary tremendously even among children of the same age. Perhaps,
then, this book should be used with older students, or at least with
students whose “horror quotients” are known to be high. Recommended
(with the noted above reservation).