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?