Rest in Pieces. Halloween Tales of Horror: 18 Illustrated Ghost Stories to Read Aloud in the Dark (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9798256272388)

Eighteen Halloween tales of horror, each short enough to finish before the candle burns down, each one illustrated in full-page black-and-white ink.

A man wakes in a freezing forest with no memory of how he got there, and the voice that answers his own telephone tells him where his body is lying. A bride hides inside an attic chest during a wedding game and is not found for years. A handyman pockets the two bronze coins laid on a dead woman's eyelids, and that night something comes to his door asking for them back. A student pulls the blanket off her sleeping roommate, and the humming does not stop.

What is inside

- Eighteen complete stories - ghosts, revenants and cursed objects, a haunted mirror, a ghost ship off the Irish coast, a spectral wolf, a marionette with glass eyes, a creature that crawls back to its burial vault, and a Mass said for the dead by the dead.

- Thirty-eight full-page ink illustrations in black and white, roughly two for every story.

- Eight quotation interludes from Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Robert Brault.

- A nineteenth tale waiting past the last entry in the contents, where nobody thought to list it.

Old legends, told in full. Much of this collection comes out of the campfire and urban-legend tradition, and each tale is given room to breathe instead of being squeezed onto a single page: the bride sealed in the chest in Gone Without a Veil, the spirit that returns for what was buried with it in Eyes on You, Always, the woman who wakes under a grave robber's knife in Buried but not Gone, the voice climbing the stairs one step at a time in Voices in the Walls, the passenger still riding the last train in The Final Stop. Others are new inventions - Manor of Mayhem, Howl at Elric, Waves of Woe, Strings Attached, Reflection of Fear, Mass of the Dead, Dare you Enter?

Who it is for. Readers who want a whole scare in five minutes rather than four hundred pages, and anyone who reads aloud. The prologue is written for exactly that: gather your friends, light the candles, and begin. Stories run four to six pages including their illustrations, which makes the collection easy to dip into and friendly to readers who bounce off long books. Suited to teen and adult readers - the horror is atmospheric and folkloric, with moments of genuine gruesomeness.

Spooky season, October 31. A collection built for Halloween displays and seasonal tables, for campfire nights, sleepovers and autumn read-aloud sessions, and as a gift for readers of ghost stories, folk horror and classic scary tales. Published in paperback and hardcover.