DARE TO BE SCARED

Some kids better watch out. That’s the ultimate, dark message in the majority of these stories in which nasty brats get their comeuppance in a variety of unpleasant, eerie ways. The good kids—well, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The tales range in scare level from amusingly macabre to downright spooky, and some seem to have bolted straight out of The Twilight Zone. What’s not to like—fanglike teeth, alien commuter buses, killer ants, relatives who return from the dead, becoming one’s own ancestor, deathly amusement-park rides, and legendary (yet, alas, all too real) monsters? Readers will relate—maybe at their peril—to the culturally diverse middle-grade boys and girls who people these strange accounts. Ouimet’s black-and-white etchings are fittingly bizarre. (Fiction. 8-12)