The Puppet's Payback and Other Chilling Tales, by Mary Downing Hahn

The Puppet’s Payback and Other Chilling Tales is a collection of ten short stories by Mary Downing Hahn—some new, some reprinted. They are, of course, all dark fantasy and horror—some that act as morality plays, some that have a punchline, some that just tell a creepy story for the sake of telling a creepy story. They feature vampires, ghosts, witches, sea monsters; some of the paranormal and supernatural beings are malicious and dangerous, some are not.

It’s fine? None of the stories are going to set the world on fire, but they’re engaging and sometimes surprising.

Some of them have passages that read quite dated—subject to change, these quotes are from a review copy—but, for real, please find me a kid who would describe a scene like this using these words:

Just as I’d thought, the park was deserted. No mothers pushing baby strollers, no kids zooming by on inline skates, no skateboarders whooping it up by the fountain, no bicyclists shouting “On your left” before zipping past on their racers.

I feel that if a kid used the phrase ‘whooping it up’ in real life, all of their friends would be like OKAY BOOMER.

But, of course—because, after all, this is Mary Downing Hahn—there are also passages that are genuinely creepy:

I was surrounded by the dead. Some of their memorials had fallen to pieces on the ground, crosses tilted to one side or another, angels missing wings or arms, their faces blank. Hundreds of graves, maybe thousands, lay in long crooked rows. I’d never realized how many people were buried here—more of them than us, I thought.

There are stories here that’ll work better for kids than adults—which is appropriate given that this is a collection for kids!—like the one in which the narrator gets turned into a vampire… and while Baby Leila would have been like OOO COOL WHAT BETTER WAY TO SPEND ETERNITY THAN TO ENDLESSLY PLAY VIDEO GAMES, Grown-Up Leila is like WHY WOULD A VAMPIRE TURN THIS SOMEWHAT ANNOYING KID INSTEAD OF JUST EATING HIM??