Review by Booklist Review
Children taken hostage by trees, malicious fairies, and spirits calling from the grave: these scenarios and more appear in this creepily sinister collection of short stories designed to disturb your slumber. Painstakingly gathered by the book's curators (who supposedly discovered them while out adventuring), the extraordinary tales are presented in themed sections (cake, luck, love, etc.), much like the objects in old curio cabinets. Pen-and-ink illustrations, letters from the curators, and a few extra tales are interspersed between chapters, adding bonus horrors to the collection. Though drawing heavily on folk- and fairy-tale traditions, these tales are neither moralistic nor cautionary. While a few 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.--Smith, Julia Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly 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. The conceit is that the authors are curators of the eponymous cabinet, a magical museum that houses the often-dangerous souvenirs and stories they bring back from their Indiana Jones-like adventures. Among the many delicious tales are Bachmann's "Johnny Knockers," which concerns the fate of a whaling ship after its crew discovers a small boy inside a whale; Legrand's "Mirror, Mirror," which tells of a nasty preteen who looks into a mirror and finds more than she bargained for; Trevayne's "The Circus," the story of a traveling circus's horrifyingly bad luck; and Catmull's "Dark Valentine," which illustrates why you don't want your dead girlfriend contacting you by cellphone. Many of these are moral tales in which nasty children or adults die horribly; others, though, feature perfectly nice people who meet similarly gruesome ends. Readers who enjoy their Halloween chills all year round will find this anthology a delight. Ages 8-12. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 5-7-Chilling, thrilling, and occasionally startlingly bleak, this collection of short stories is arranged through an ingenious conceit: the tales are housed in the imaginary cabinet of the title. The tales which live in this cabinet of the strange and sinister have been collected (written) by four different curators (authors): Stefan Bachmann, Katherine Catmull, Claire Legrand, and Emma Trevayne. Themes are introduced through letters sent back and forth between the curators, each of whom assumes a different persona, which helps build a world around the stories themselves. Fans of shivery tales will find much to appreciate here, from dolls who love their playmates a little too much to luck that comes at a high price. Taken as a whole, however, a dark, almost nihilistic feeling pervades the stories, bringing the potential audience into question. Short enough to be read aloud, the book invites comparisons to Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (HarperCollins, 1981), though readers may leave this cabinet with lingering feelings of dread, rather than the cathartic jolt of a jump scare.-Elisabeth Gattullo Marrocolla, Darien Library, CT (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Four "curators"--Bachmann, Catmull, Legrand, and Trevayne--travel to lands peregrine and outre to fill their Cabinet of Curiosities museum, sending back grotesqueries and objects of wonder as well as the tales behind them--tales that often bend to the tenebrous and unearthly. The table of contents lists the Cabinet's "rooms" and "drawers," each with a theme (cake, luck, tricks, flowers) and four or five tales to explore. In "The Cake Made Out of Teeth" ("collected by" Legrand) a spoiled-rotten boy must finish an entire cake made in his image, despite the sensation of teeth chewing him up with every bite. "Lucky, Lucky Girl" (Catmull) stars a young woman whose good luck seems to depend on the very bad luck of the people around her. In "Plum Boy and the Dead Man" (Bachmann), a rich and opinionated lad has a conversation with a corpse hanging from a tree...and ends up unwillingly changing places with the victim. "The Book of Bones" (Trevayne) features Eleanor Entwhistle, a plucky girl whose courage halts the work of a grave-robbing sorcerer. 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. anita l. burkam (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Styling themselves "curators," four of horror fantasy's newer stars share tales and correspondence related to an imaginary museum of creepy creatures and artifacts.In addition to Bachmann, the authors include Katherine Catmull, Claire Legrand and Emma Trevayne. The letters, scattered throughout, record adventures in gathering the Cabinet's eldritch collections or report allusively on them: "I just let them creep or wing about the place," writes Curator Catmull, "and stretch their many, many, many legs. What jolly shouts I hear when the workers come across one!" The stories, most of which were previously published on the eponymous website, are taken from eight thematic drawers ranging from "Love" and "Tricks" to "Cake." Along with a cast of evil magicians, oversized spiders and other reliable frights, the stories throw children into sinister situations in graveyards, deceptively quiet gardens or forests, their own bedrooms and similar likely settings. Said children are seldom exposed to gory or explicit violence and, except for horrid ones who deserve what they get, generally emerge from their experiences better and wiseror at least alive. Jansson's small black-and-white vignettes add scattered but appropriately enigmatic visual notes.A hefty sheaf of chillersall short enough to share aloud and expertly cast to entice unwary middle graders a step or two into the shadows. (index, not seen) (Horror/short stories. 10-13) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
