The Book

The Cabinet is a book! You may find The Cabinet of Curiosities: 36 Tales Brief & Sinister at your friendly neighborhood bookshop–or your sinister one. You know the one, with cobwebs in the corners and a man at the counter who is already old but never gets any older.

If you fear the old man, you may also buy the book at any of the links at the bottom of this page. Be aware that eight of the stories in the book, and all of its extensive collection of curatorial letters, have never before been seen by human eyes, online or anywhere else.

It looks like this

While off on our travels to collect more curiosities, we have been sent some lovely messages about the book from lucky people whose job it is to read books and share their thoughts:

A hefty sheaf of chillers—all short enough to share aloud and expertly cast to entice unwary middle graders a step or two into the shadows. — Kirkus (Starred review)

This collection of 36 short dark fantasies from Bachmann, Catmull, Legrand, and Trevayne aspires to sit on the same shelf as Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and succeeds admirably. . . . Readers who enjoy their Halloween chills all year round will find this anthology a delight. — Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

Readers will become addicted to these 36 short stories. . . . The book is thick, but the tales fly by. It makes a great read-aloud in bits and snatches for a family road trip, or straight through on a rainy afternoon. Give this to fans of Adam Gidwitz’s Tales Dark and Grimm and Candace Fleming’s On the Day I Died. — Shelf Awareness

“While a few [of the stories] contain lessons that can be learned, the majority exist simply to give readers a fright or chill. And this they do quite well. Not for the faint of heart, this curious collection of stories will haunt and, at times, horrify and are best read by flashlight.” — Booklist

“The stories are remarkable both for their uniformly high quality and for their distinctness from one another; the abundant atmospherics, including occasional stark black-and-white illustrations, provide a unifying sense of dread. The framing device—the curators send letters from the field introducing their latest discoveries—adds depths of mystery, danger, and idiosyncrasy to a book already swimming in each.” — The Horn Book

The Cabinet of Curiosities is available from