Scare Me

K R Alexander's Scare Me is a genuinely creepy story for 8 year olds about a boy who builds haunted houses and then meets something he didn't build.

What happens

Every October the town of Happy Hills hands over its oldest mansion to four teams of children. One team per floor. Whoever makes the scariest one wins a year of pizza and ice cream, and the ticket money goes to the animal shelter.

Kevin takes this extremely seriously. He wants to build haunted houses and film effects when he grows up. He and his friends Tanesha and Julie have the basement, and he can already see it. Papier-mache trees round the pillars, moss off the air ducts, moonlight. A graveyard.

Then he spots something in the corner that the caretaker meant to clear out. A mannequin in an old wedding dress, facing the wall, with a smooth blank face behind a veil.

He knocks into it. Her head comes off and shatters on the concrete.

There's a placard at her feet with newspaper cuttings pasted on. A bride from the town drowned herself. Her family, unable to bear it, made this copy of her.

Kevin knows he isn't allowed to use anything belonging to the house. He decides to use her anyway.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This one is written to frighten and it works. The bride's story is a young woman taking her own life and a family who tried to replace their dead daughter, and it comes up several times rather than once. A plastic skeleton with no batteries in it starts speaking to Kevin by name. If your reader is at all suggestible about the dark, leave this for a couple of years. If they're the child who begs for the scary shelf, they'll love it.

What makes it better than it needs to be is Kevin himself. He's happy, funny and completely obsessed, he has two dads, and he has a rival who wears frilly old-fashioned clothes and gets away with everything (grown-ups think she's darling). Half the fun is simply watching him plan. He loves haunted houses because everything inside one is explainable. So the moment something isn't, you feel it with him.

What to read next

For a spookiness that comes with more laughs, The Haunted Mustache is here. A whole town bolts its doors and puts on fake moustaches one night every October, and two boys decide to find out why.