The Fearsome Foursome

Gr 4–7—Middle schoolers Willa, Tim, Noah, and Steve bond over their love of horror and form The Fearsome Foursome, their storytelling club. They meet weekly to share tales of ghosts and ghouls. One day, their headquarters gets demolished in a freakish storm. In the wreckage, the quartet find four fancy invitations to an address on the other side of town. Intrigued, they find it's a Gothic mansion, which seems deserted except for the librarian, who is the keeper of all scary stories. It turns out the librarian has a story to read about each of them, and he insists they will be dying to find out how these tales end. This is the first in a new series based on the Disney theme park ride the Haunted Mansion. The selections are gruesome—some include rotting corpses—but are not too frightening for most middle grade readers.