The Cabinet of Curiosities: 36 Tales Brief & Sinister by Stefan Bachmann (review)

For readers who have gloried in and graduated from Alvin Schwartz’s collections of scary stories, the tales collected here will provide a deliciously tingly next step. The four authors style themselves as curators, collectors of strange objects and the stories behind them, and hint at the dangers they have encountered to procure their tales from this and other realms. The stories mostly feature children, some innocent and some decidedly not, some contemporary and some from those timeless, quasi-medieval villages that feature prominently in wonder tales. The cabinet of the title is conceived as a flying house, with the stories contained in various themed rooms, including travel, love, luck, song, fairy tales, tricks, cake, and flowers. Each category features stories of varying length and degrees of disquiet: a cake consumes an insufferable brat, a hanged man overtakes the body of the hangman’s young son, a boy boards a skeleton train for a wild night ride, enchanted roses suffocate an entire town, and a cell phone continues to keep a boy in contact with his beloved beyond the grave. Standard horror tropes are given fresh twists in both the stories themselves and the accompanying spot art in the style of Edward Gorey and Tim Burton; all of the tales are engagingly unsettling in some way, with a select few crossing over into genuine nightmare territory. Many of the stories are reprinted from the website of the same title and are available there in podcasts read by their authors; having them in print, however, makes them accessible for browsing and sharing during those in-between times of the school day.