Stinetinglers: All New Stories by the Master of Scary Tales

Stinetinglers by R. L. Stine is a collection of brand new scary stories for 8 year olds, with Stine himself introducing each one before it begins.

What happens

The first is about Gabe, who is late for everything. He has promised his best mate Carver he'll be on time for the birthday party, and to help with that he sneaks into the guest room cupboard where his parents hide the Christmas presents and tries on a smart watch he is not supposed to know about.

He drops it. The screen cracks. The time freezes at ten past six.

So does everything else. His parents are still watching the same octopus programme. The grandfather clock still says ten past six. He goes to bed, sleeps, comes downstairs, and it is ten past six again.

That is a very good idea and Stine plays it properly. Gabe can't tell anybody what has happened without admitting he was in the cupboard, so he is trapped inside his own small lie while the evening refuses to move on.

The short introductions are worth having. Stine says where the idea came from (in this case, lying awake on Christmas Eve while the clock barely shifts) and then gets out of the way.

Elsewhere in the collection, one child cannot stand insects and then starts noticing them in every single room. Another is out on the basketball court when his hands begin coming apart, invisibly to everybody but him. Three friends dig at something in the earth that will not stop widening.

The shape suits a child who wants a scare but not a whole novel of one. Each story runs about twenty minutes. If one of them is too much, the next is a fresh start rather than more of the same, which is not true of a full-length horror book at bedtime.

The frights are the creeping sort rather than the gory sort. Faceless shadow children closing into a circle around a playground swing. Something ordinary in the house going quietly wrong. There is almost no blood, but there is a lot of dread, and several of these stories end badly for the child in them.

Your 8 year old will know inside one story whether this is their thing. Some children will read the lot in a single sitting. Others will want the landing light on afterwards, and this is firmly a book for the first sort.

What to read next

After one long scare instead of a string of short ones? The Werewolf of Fever Swamp drops Grady's family in next door to a Florida swamp where something howls at the moon every single night.