THE BOXCAR CHILDREN SPOOKTACULAR SPECIAL

 THE BOXCAR CHILDREN IS A SERIES OF BOOKS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN CREATED IN 1924 AND WRITTEN BY GERTRUDE CHANDLER WARNER. 

The first book in the series featured a quarter of children -- Henry, Jessie, Violet and Benny -- whose parents are killed and they runaway to live in an old railroad boxcar they find abandoned in the woods because they fear their unseen grandfather is wicked.  Turns out, when they finally meet their gramps, he is nice as can be and adopts the children; he also had the boxcar brought to his house for the children.  The book series would slowly develop into books which found the children solving mysteries a la The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and the Three Investigators.  However, the Boxcar Children is written for younger children than these others.  I first learned about the Boxcar children from our friend Cameron Chaney:  author of AUTUMNCROW and curator of the Library Macabre over on youtube.  The Boxcar Children novels have continued to be written after Warner's death and there have been something like 160 novels in the series so far.  While there's no real horror in these children's novels, they are definitely horror adjacent with enough spooky atmosphere without truly frightening the children.  I recently read this "Spooktacular Special" which combines 3 Boxcar Children novels into one edition. 

There are several of these spooky-themed tri-novel editions (shown above . . . and yes, I own them too) but this is the only one I've read so far.  It contains the novels "The Mystery of the Haunted Boxcar" (strange occurrences inside the kids' boxcar might signal the presence of a ghost), "The Pumpkin Head Mystery (the Beckett farm is menaced by a ghost with a glowing pumpkin head)" and "The Zombie Project (looks like there's a zombie terrorizing the forest surrounding Winding River Lodge)".  If you've got a kid who likes things spooky, here's some good reading for the Halloween season.  And if you're an old ghoul like me who just likes a quick, fun and cozy little October reading, these books will also transport you back to your childhood when you first learned what a magical time Halloween is.  Like SCOOBY-DOO, the monsters, ghosts and zombies in these novels are never real but there's still a lot of spooky fun to be had by all.