When you read this book, you’re going to wonder how you managed without it. This collection of 19 ghost stories from a wide range of oral traditions is the book for kids (and this seems to be all of them at the moment) who simply long to be terrified. For them, a collection of ghost stories has one overwhelming requirement – that of genuine scariness with a side order of gore. This one fills the bill. Readers will encounter the monster with the long tongue who sucks your life out through your navel, along with severed ears and chewed-off toes, and the man who removes his clothes and then his skin, his flesh, and his bones.

But this book is far more than an ooze-fest. It is a collection of compelling highly individual voices told by storytellers such as Alice Kane, Rita Cox, Johnny Moses, Gail de Vos, Kate Stevens, and a host of others. You’ll hear the everyday anecdotal voice telling you about the boy who got a new paper route, the gentle hypnotic Celtic voice lulling you into false security (“Bake me a bannock and cut me a collop, for I’m off to seek my fortune”), the voice of the old codger, and the voice of the garrulous nine-year-old.

The stories come from all corners of Canada, from First Nations people, and from China, eastern Europe, Japan, the American south, the Philippines. But this isn’t multiculturalism-by-numbers. This is the real McCoy and it serves to remind us of the great richness and congeniality of our storytelling community. The collection includes personal histories, urban myths, folktales, and family stories, and there isn’t a dud among them. They’re best read by candlelight, beside a campfire in the woods, or home alone, although these tales passed an acid test by rendering me rapt and goose-bumpy in a noisy fluorescent-lit doctor’s waiting room. Put this book on the shelf beside Janet Lunn’s collection The Unseen, and you’ll be well prepared for the next reader on the rebound from series horror.