Home » Posts tagged "Help a Reader Out" (Page 5)

Help a Reader Out: A Purple Cover With an Orange Pumpkin

Helayna writes:

Hello, When i was in primary school, i used to always take this horror book out of the library… the thing that’s troubling me is that I cant remember the title or the author… and it was my favourite book. The cover is purple with an orange pumpkin in the middle, and it was full of shortish horror stories, and i think in one of the stories there was a family who got murdered in their house and Bridget was the murderer, and a man’s nose was swiped clean off with an axe… I REALLY need to find this book. I think it was in a series along with “the phone goes dead”, i dont think its the Horowitz Horror books, but i remember the series had the same kind of design but different colours and different picture in the middle…I think one of the other series cover picture had a sillouette of a tree with a “hanging rope” hanging off it… AND it is definitely not the Goosebumps series, I read those too. So please help me find this book!! I was hoping you would know… Thanks.

This one I don’t know. There are tons of books with purple covers and orange pumpkins on the cover. The first one I thought of was Big Pumpkin, but that’s a picture book.  Helayna must have been in school in the 1990’s, to reference the series she did here. There are so many Goosebumps knockoff series with garish covers that I don’t know which one this could be.

The fact that it is a collection of short stories ought to narrow it down, but the description of the cover doesn’t match any collection of short stories I can think of. The short story Helayna referenced, “The Phone Goes Dead”, is in one of the Horowitz Horror books, but she says that the book she is looking for is not part of that series, or part of Goosebumps.

Anyone with ideas?

Posted on August 13, 2013 by , Reply

Help a Reader Out: A Spine Chilling Series for Kids

Nicholas writes:

Hi. I’m trying to find a kids to pre-teen scary book series and having alot of difficulty.. It was a small box set with three or four books, each with three stories. I can’t remember exactly what they were called.. Spine Chillers or something like that I think. One story was about hedge animals that come to life.. Another was about a cursed newspaper route a kid gets from his brother.. Another was about a kid who wakes up to nobody knowing who he is except a mysterious Asian woman.. Any ideas? It was around the Goosebumps days. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

This seems like it should be an easy question to answer, but actually, it’s not. Publishers went bananas with the advent of Goosebumps. They all wanted to jump on that bandwagon! And all of those series lasted for more than three or four books. The series Nicholas remembers could be  Betsy Haynes’ Bone Chillers, M.T. Coffin’s Spinetinglers, or Fred E. Katz’s Spine Chillers. The only problem is that these series told only one story per book. The Midnight Library books by Damien Graves has three stories per volume, but the plots he describes don’t match up to the stories in the books. I shared the information I had with Nicholas, but I’d really like to know if this is a series, what series it is, and I’m sure Nicholas would love to know as well. If any of this sound familiar to you, post a comment, or email me at monsterlibrarian@monsterlibrarian.com

Posted on March 27, 2013 by , 2 comments

Help a Reader Out: The Girl with the Demon Tattoo

A mystery keyword searcher is looking for:

a book about a girl called leslie who likes tattoos and falls in love with a demon

I love it when I know the answer! The book is Ink Exchange by Melissa Marr, the second book in her Wicked Lovely series. It’s a young adult urban fantasy series, but lovers of urban fantasy and dark fantasy of whatever age should really enjoy it. However, the tone is different than it is in Wicked Lovely. Ink Exchange is extremely dark and even horrifying, so readers looking for a standard paranormal romance with a happily-ever-after will probably prefer something else.

Posted on March 4, 2013 by , Reply
First « 34567 » Last