Children's Horror Stories

After years of desultory net searches it dawned on me today that I have a fertile patch to pick in this here board, so I wd like to ask a question.

As a child I was v. into a series of compilations (UK) of ghost/horror stories for children that I can't now remember the title of. Some stories I remember from these compilations included

- a guy who inherits some kind of mansion with a fierce carved stone wolf head at the door which eventually bites his hand off when he tries to move it

- somebody completing a spooky jigsaw of a cottage in a murky wood that, upon completion, transports them to said cottage whose unpleasant inhabitant procedes to eat them or something

- some kind of "hounds of hell" type story

- something about a troll that appears at lightning speed when summoned and disposes of a spouse after a misjudged argument

sorry this is all v. tenuous and these half-remembered stories come from different volumes of the series but i remember being v. impressed as a child that people died and otherwise came to bad ends thru no real fault of their own, this seemed like a cool grown-up thing for children's stories when i was a child.

any ideas?

hmm that troll one rings a v faint bell but that's all. i have a half remembered story of my own about some kids getting their own back on a bully by playing some kind of hide and seek game in an abandoned factory, he goes through a door but then the door disappears and what happens to you after you go through a door that isn't there?

Sorry NV, I've tried a few searches but nothing seems to be coming up. You could try Kindertrauma, but although they claim to cover books they usually deal more with film and TV.

have found several terribly written urban legend style versions of that jigsaw puzzle tale e.g. http://www.scarystories.info/the-strangest-jigsaw-puzzle/332/

doesn't help much i know.

the onion AV club used to (or maybe still does) run a feature where you could e-mail them questions like this and they would get back to you with what they thought it might be

I used them once and they got back to me and got it right, it was awesome

Surely it's nothing as obvious as

http://www.browniebites.net/photos/scary-stories-to-tell-in-the-dark-1.jpg

Alfred Hitchcock's anthologies?

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51QzEw8npsL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Feel like Pan or Sphere or NEL must have had some exploitation-for-kids line, but damned if I can find it.

yeah i feel sure that it was called something as simple as "[Publisher] Book of Ghost Stories [1, 2, 3 etc]"

maybe even more minimal than that. a name publisher too i think.

Jan Harold Brunvand is a must for children reading at an advanced level. I liked spooky stories too, and like the original poster, I can't remember the titles. Seems like the industry doesn't embrace the "classics" as they do with adult literature.

Seems like they'd be a great read on vacation!

unbelievably, they replaced the creepy illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark with something tamer a few years ago xxp

80s/90s kids were pissed, let me tell you...

http://cache.io9.com/assets/images/8/2012/02/94aca2e890e24d26534a07968e360705.jpg

I'm an American but read lots of British books as a child. I'm frustrated because sites favor very recent literature...a mid-century children's book is a hard find, I'm always looking for them in bookstores.

Google Books turned up encyclopedias for children's literature and also science fiction / fantasy / horror literature, however.

I remember Joan Aiken and Jan Pienkowski's A Foot In The Grave giving me the horrors as a kid... Especially the one about the ghost baby and the one about the swamp creatures.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Foot-Grave-Puffin-Books/dp/0140361111/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335270435&sr=1-2

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsxtlcNncv1r13h99o1_500.jpg

unbelievably, they replaced the creepy illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark with something tamer a few years ago xxp

noooooooooooo

That fucking horse kept me from sleeping for WEEKS. Worst one bar none.

was it definitely a kid's series?

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Cb4mdL5MI2A/TQVOY21KjkI/AAAAAAAAH34/fedLRup2WNo/s1600/28629.png.jpg

yeah, i remember the Pan books as a kid, this was v. much like a children's version of them, but fewer stories to the volume iirc and certainly less lurid covers. they were in the children's library which the Pans certainly wouldn't have been, tho i suspect the difference in story content was negligible at times.