Strange and Spooky Stories: A Haunted Canada Book

Deborah Dowson is a Canadian children’s librarian living in Harvard,
Massachusetts.

The eerie shrouded skeleton pictured on the cover of this collection of
short stories suggests that the book will be extremely frightening, but
that is actually one of the scariest parts the book. The stories depict
a variety of strange situations involving children, and more often than
not, they are more psychologically intriguing than terrifying. The book
is suspenseful, but not overly scary, which makes it appropriate for
younger readers.

In two of the stories, a dead friend or relative helps save a family
member in a mysterious way. A few of the stories involve obsessive
behaviour that becomes extreme and starts to control the child in an
alarming way (it’s resolved before the end of the story). Fear or
hauntings, either real or imagined, is the topic of a few of the stories
as well.

The stories are appealing in their variety of characters, subject, and
setting, and in the way that they describe an ordinary situation, such
as a bully at school, then deviate from that point until they become
“strange and spooky.” Often it is left to the reader to determine
how much of the mystery was real and how much was imagined or
coincidence.

This collection, originally published in 1994 as Ghosts and Other Scary
Stories, will appeal to fans of lightly scary stories. Pat Hancock is
the award-winning author of Haunted Canada: True Ghost Stories (2003).
Recommended.