Bedtime Stories That Will Terrify Children: Eight Tales to Help Parents & Children Navigate Fear

What if the stories we tell before sleep... aren't meant to comfort, but to awaken?

In this haunting collection of eight stories, Randolph B. Schiffer draws on the psychology of childhood fears and the fragile magic of memory.

Bedtime Stories That Will Terrify Children explores the mysteries that live inside us long after the lights go out.

Each story is a meditation on fear, love, and the strange inheritance of family-stories of boys, fathers, and the shadows that shape them.

They are bedtime stories for adults who still remember the dark.

And for children who have always known it was there

These are not stories to lull children to sleep.

They're the stories we tell when there's nothing left to say-except the truth, cloaked in fable.

Told in the flickering voice of an aging narrator remembering the tales his father once whispered to him and his brother, this haunting collection confronts childhood fears with sharp wit and quiet terror. A dog that might be a monster. A squirrel that guards the door between worlds. A red plant that eats what it pleases.

This is bedtime for grownups.

And the monsters are real-because they live in memory.

"I wrote this book for my children. Not because I had the answers-but because the stories might ask the right questions."

Randolph B. Schiffer

Condensed Author's Note

In the spring of 1990, my wife and I were told that our three-year-old son, Brenton, had acute lymphocytic leukemia. At that time, survival was uncertain, and treatment was long, painful, and unforgiving. We could not control the disease - but we believed we might help him endure it.

Small children do not fear death; they fear abandonment. So we restructured our lives to ensure that Brenton was never alone. And when doctors later warned us he might be relapsing, I began telling him stories at bedtime - stories of danger and courage, fear and resilience. In them, I reversed the roles I wished I could have reversed in real life: the father became the one in peril; the child, the witness to strength.

These eight stories are not gentle tales. They are stories of suspense and moral reckoning, of animals and ancient spirits, of cowardice and bravery. They were told by candlelight during the hardest year of our lives, in the hope that story might fortify where medicine could not.

The doctors were wrong. Brenton survived. He is now grown, with a child of his own.

I have written these stories down in the hope that somewhere, another child - and another family - might find in them what we did: not comfort, but courage.

Randolph B. Schiffer