Category Archives: YA (grades 7-9)

145G: 90’s horror anthology (solved)

A horror anthology read in the early 90s, found at a school book fair.

-A girl has the power to shrink people who she feels betray her and keeps them in a dollhouse or birdcage.
-Two siblings befriend the new neighbor only to find that she’s a vampire
-A girl keeps hearing something in the cellar begging her for help. It turns out to be some mummified creature that drags her under the floor and that it had meant “help” as in “I’m hungry”
-SHADOWS COME TO LIFE AND KILL PEOPLE. There’s this big scene at the end where the latest victim family is desperately trying to light matches to keep the shadows away.

145F: Alien cube steals knowledge (Solved)

I read this in the late 80’s / early 90’s.  A girl discovers that her friends are using a cube like device that when activated sends them on adventures. The only adventure I remember is all of them being shrunk and swimming in a pool of spilled soda.   But with each use, they lose more of their knowledge and start using other words because they can’t remember the actual one-in one case saying “Hitchcock” instead of ketchup.   The girl finds out through her dreams(?) that the device has been sent from another world by a queen who’s already drained all of her subjects of all their knowledge.   I remember the cover was mainly black with the girl looking into a light. 

145C: Horror story Collection (solved)

This was a collection of short horror stories I read in the early 90s. The version I read was hardcover with an illustration of leaves swirling down a hallway. Here’s what else I remember: 

1. A boy who hates raking leaves is attacked by them

2. A depressed girl meets a giant talking rabbit who also plays the fiddle

3. A girl babysits twins with a complicated ritual that they say keeps monsters from eating them. The babysitter is saved from an intruder by these monsters because he didn’t know the ritual and she did. 

4. A boy writes a screenplay about defeating brain-eating alien mosquitoes.  Later it turns out that the studio executive he gave the screenplay to is a brain-eating alien mosquito!

 5. A young boy who’s desperately trying to lose weight keeps fantasizing about his favorite junk cereal. Then there’s a scene where I think a Thanksgiving turkey comes to life? But mainly he just really wants that cereal.

144I: Cabbage air freshener and a magical world?

YA or kids’ book, fantasy or magical realism.  Protagonist is a young girl.  She gets sent to the store to buy something with a wick — either an air freshener or a candle?  The one she buys is the last on the shelf, it’s in a dented can, and it smells like something you wouldn’t want air freshener to smell like.  I think it’s either cabbages or broccoli.  It’s also magical, and either gives her access to a magical world or brings her a friend/companion from a magical world.  That’s all in the book’s set-up, like in the first chapter.  No idea what happens from there.

 

142C: Scholastic Short Story Contest Winner – Gargoyles come to life! (solved)

I am looking for a book I bought at school thru the Scholastic Book Club, 1982-1986.
The author was 18 and had written a short story that won a contest. The book I bought was the longer version of that story written after the contest, althou it was only around 120 pages I believe.
The story was about a misfit high school boy who made models of gargoyle-like creatures that were about 3 feet tall and for some reason they came to life. The cover was of the boy in his living room and in the background on the stairs was a set of gargoyle legs coming to get him.
I called Scholastic a few years ago to ask about contest winners as I thought it would be the
easiest way to find a name but they referred me to their Canadian office and they never got back to me.

 

141Q: Son, father and Stonehenge-like village (solved)

From what I remember as a ten year-old: the book was for tweens, probably published in the seventies, mid to late. It is a chapter book, contemporary, about a father and son visiting a quiet (English? New England?) village that has a secret. The people in the town are all secretive and distrustful of outsiders, but the boy strikes up a romantic friendship with a girl from the town. The mystery of the town centers around a Stonehenge-type ruin. The climax of the book involves a cyclical resetting of the people of the town and their memories.

 

141P: Marooned with Deadly Crawlers

I am looking for a book that was bought at a school book sale in Massachusetts in the mid 60’s by a ninth grader. It’s about a group of men on a desert island with poisonous spiders or crabs. One man has immunity to them and becomes the leader. A black man also develops immunity and splits loyalty in the group. At that point in the story the book was stolen from my friend and he hasn’t read another book since. Thank you for any help.