Ghostly, Ghastly Tales: The Last Note

• Siobhan O'Brien Holmes
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I spotted Frights to Tell at Night: Ghostly, Ghastly Tales by Anastasia Garcia on Instagram last year right around Christmas. I loved the cover and thought the collection of spooky short stories sounded good, but then when the light turned off and I saw the book glows in the dark I naturally had to buy it.

I am SUCH a sucker for glow-in-the-dark anything.

I contemplated buying it for my son as a Christmas present but decided he wouldn’t appreciate it as much as I would, so I bought it as a present to myself. And it didn’t disappoint!

The embossed hardback cover and spine with neon pink grinning demon and glowing ghost, illustrated by Teo Skaffa, are gorgeous, and that’s before you even get inside. The bright pink endpapers with little skulls, the polaroids of a slenderman-esque figure on the inside front cover, and this lovely intro:

But don’t be too afraid – scary stories are not just here to make our knees tremble and our spine tingle. Scary stories make us strong. They allow our mind to conjure up the most terrifying things imaginable so we gather our strength and prepare to face them. Remember, if you ever get too scared while reading, you can just close the book.

I say it all the time but YES, scary stories make children stronger! I love the reminder that they can just shut the book – I know this is specifically referring to being frightened, but I think that’s something children need to be told regardless of the story’s genre. Not enjoying it? Close it! Move on to the next book. Life’s too short.

So, with all that front matter out of the way, let’s look at the first story in the collection: ‘The Last Note’ inspired by an 1860s Jewish folktalke originating in Germany about a haunted violin. Garcia’s interpretation is a spooky tale of a young boy who dreams of being a professional pianist. His mother brings home a piano and he’s super excited to play it, but soon his dreams are filled with images of severed hands playing the keys at night. Or are they dreams? I loved the ending – it’s left slightly ambiguous but the implication is pretty horrific!

Something else that’s brilliant about this collection is that each story comes with a ‘fright level’ indicator so readers can prepare themselves for the scare or skip over the stories that might be too intense for them. ‘The Last Note’ is just one out of three on the fear scale, and I’d call it creepy rather than full on scary so it’s unlikely to give children serious nightmares. There are a few grisly details, though, like the ‘jagged’ wrists, ‘bloody stumps like they were recently chopped off, the bone exposed and the hands afloat’. I love this, because authors always ask me if their manuscripts are too gruesome and here we have a fairly tame story aimed (I’d say) at a lower middle grade audience around 8 or 9 and there are bloody stumps and exposed bone all over the place! You can get away with a lot more than you think as long as it doesn’t feel deliberately over the top or gratuitous.