Dan Poblocki’s The Stone Child is a creepy mystery for 10 year olds about a boy whose favourite horror author turns out to have been real.<\/p>\n
It opens with a crash. The family car comes round a bend and something steps out of the woods. Black hair, four long thin legs, red-rimmed yellow eyes, a mouth full of teeth. Eddie sees it properly. His parents do not.<\/p>\n
Dad tells the police he hit a bear.<\/p>\n
They are moving house anyway, so Eddie has enough to think about. New town, new school, no idea what any of it will look like. He has been rereading a favourite scary book in the back seat to make himself feel better.<\/p>\n
Then he looks down the road and recognises the house on the hill. It is the house from the back cover of the book in his hands. Nathaniel Olmstead lived there. Nathaniel Olmstead disappeared thirteen years ago and nobody knows what happened to him.<\/p>\n
The town is called Gatesweed. Eddie has just moved into the town his favourite writer vanished from.<\/p>\n
What makes it work is that Eddie is exactly the sort of reader your reader might be. He knows every Olmstead title. He has read them all at least twice. So when he finds a handwritten book filled with three-letter nonsense words, he does not panic, he goes to the library and takes out a book about codes.<\/p>\n
The scares build slowly and they are the good kind. An old cinema with half its letters missing. A policeman who stares too long. A boy at the bookshop who pushes a book into Eddie’s hands and shuts the door on him.<\/p>\n
It is genuinely frightening in places, so it is worth a thought if your reader is a hovers-at-the-doorway sort at bedtime. Nothing in the opening is gory. The horror is a thing glimpsed at the edge of the trees, a wrecked bumper with black hair stuck to it, and a grown-up insisting it was only a bear.<\/p>\n
Children who love being scared on purpose tend to find this the best possible combination.<\/p>\n
Readers who finish this one still wanting their nerves tested have More Tales to Keep You Up at Night by the same author. It is short stories rather than one long one, wrapped inside a boy playing a satchel of old cassette tapes he was told not to play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dan Poblocki’s The Stone Child is a creepy mystery for 10 year olds about a boy whose favourite horror author turns out to have been real. It opens with a crash. The family car comes round a bend and something steps out of the woods. Black hair, four long thin legs, red-rimmed yellow eyes, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10673,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8111,"lr_next_read_anchor":"More Tales to Keep You Up at Night","lr_seo_hook":"The horror writer who vanished lived in the house on the hill."},"book_tag":[1051],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[222],"class_list":["post-9431","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-scary-books","age_group-books-for-10-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-dan-poblocki"],"yoast_title":"The Stone Child by Dan Poblocki | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"The horror writer who vanished lived in the house on the hill. For ages 10+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n