Bedtime stories: a timeless tradition passed down through generations of parents and children. The Ugly Duckling, Sleeping Beauty, The Three Little Pigs, Goodnight Moon. Since their invention, these classic tales have ushered countless little ones into a state of peaceful slumber. But not all bedtime stories deliver sweet dreams. In his newest book, Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children: And Keep Them Awake All Night Long, psychiatrist, neurologist, Marine Corps Veteran, and author Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer presents a series of allegorical horror stories sure to send a shiver down your spine. Here’s everything you need to know before the book hits shelves on October 28!
Trigger Warning: Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children contains discussions of human and animal death. Please exercise personal care while reading.
Synopsis
These aren’t your mother’s bedtime stories. Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer’s adult-oriented bedtime tales aren’t here to soothe you to sleep. Rather, they’ll have you too afraid to close your eyes.
In this series of short fables, an aging narrator reflects on the haunting bedtime stories his father told him and his brother when they were young. Carnivorous plants with ceaseless appetites. Stuffed animals with sinister intentions. Clawed creatures lurking in a shadowy forest. The monsters that inhabit these twisted tales aren’t make-believe. They’re real, and they live inside our minds. Are you ready to face your nightmares?
An Interconnected Collection of Terror-Inducing Parables
Dog is a furry, friendly type of animal well enough to have about by day. But in the night take care. The wolf from which descends the Dog is there: lurking, waiting, watching the rising of the moon.
— Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer, Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children
Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer’s Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children is a collection of cautionary tales designed to instill critical virtues such as loyalty, courage, and resilience in readers. These eight parables offer lessons on prejudice, confronting uncertainty, the conflict between good and evil, and more. In the fright-filled pages of Schiffer’s stories, a household pet can become a ferocious monster, and a misunderstood stranger can become a storybook villain. Each venture into the unknown comes with an indispensable life lesson — but only for those brave enough to see it through.
An Insightful Exploration of Imagination
‘What Randy saw with one eye were many things, all shadowy, all drifting shapes in darkness, unreal, or so he told himself,’ said the Father. ‘But then, after a time, there in the bedroom doorway, there was something which would not drift. There was a hunchy figure there, or perhaps not. If it were a real figure, thought Randy to himself, it would move. Randy closed his one eye. He opened it again. He looked. The figure moved. It came into the bedroom.’
— Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer, Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children
Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children obfuscates the fine line between reality and imagination to petrifying effect. The father who narrates the titular bedtime tales blends people and places from his sons’ real lives into his narrative, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction. As slivers of truth seep into his stories, his sons lose their tether on the here and now and slip into a world of supernatural terror, where their darkest nightmares are free to run wild. In investigating the boundlessness of childhood imagination, Dr. Schiffer exposes how the mundane can give rise to our most fantastical fears.
A Meditation on Parental Duty
To tell stories well — to really reach a child — we must let ourselves become children again. That’s the strange magic of parenting: as children grow into us, we grow back into them. Their world is fuller than ours. More changeable. More magical. And, often, more terrifying.
— Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer, Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children
More than just a sequence of spine-tingling fables, Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children is a series of tender insights passed down from parent to child through the wonder of storytelling. How do we adequately prepare our children to face the world? As a parent himself, Dr. Schiffer sought to leave his kids with valuable life lessons — not by handing them the answers to life’s toughest challenges, but by guiding them toward important questions they’ll have to answer for themselves. In this book, he utilizes fear as a teaching tool to shepherd children along the path of education and growth. As uncomfortable as it may be, confronting our fears helps us recognize our strengths and limitations, enabling us to navigate the world, even after our parents are no longer here to guide us.
A Tender Lesson in Goodbyes
The stories we tell children at night carry our values, our fears, our imaginings — and the truths we hesitate to speak aloud. They shape who the children are, and who they might become. If time is always short while they are young — and it is — then stories are how we leave our trace.
— Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer, Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children
One of the most horrifying realities Dr. Schiffer’s characters must confront is the inevitability of loss. Faced with his impending death, a father begins to tell his sons bedtime stories as a way of leaving his legacy through story. In the waning days of his life, the dying father weaves every last message he has for his children in a captivating collection of tales — one that will stay with them long after his earthly time is up. In effect, Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children is an instruction manual for saying goodbye, revealing storytelling as a medium for transcending mortality.
Final Thoughts
Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children by Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer is an unflinching reflection on parenthood, the power of childhood imagination, and the utility of fear. In these eight nightmarish morality tales, Schiffer blends myth and memory to address universal themes of legacy, mortality, and coming of age. Light a candle and settle in for a bedtime story unlike any you’ve heard before — if you dare.
You’ll love Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children if you enjoyed these books:
- Dark Tales by Shirley Jackson
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
- The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey
- The Witches by Roald Dahl
If you want to add Bedtime Stories To Terrify Children to your TBR, you can preorder it on Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Thank you to Omera Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
To check out our exclusive interview with Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer, click here!
To browse more books like this, check out Bookstr’s Spine-Chilling Horror Novels shelf on Bookshop!
