BONES AND BERSERKERS

Author Hale’s namesake—spy and Revolutionary hero Nathan Hale—huddles with compatriots beneath a gallows as they regale one another with ghoulish tales drawn from history, literature, and legend.

Hale’s latest set of Hazardous Tales begins, as it really needs to, with a cautionary note: “Are you a second grader reading way above your age level? If so, set this book down. It’s not for you.” Indeed, the book doesn’t skimp on the disturbing bits. With evocative titles like “The Demon Cat” and “The Head in the Jar” to provide at least a little warning, the author gathers a variety of terrifying tales; three involve the Jersey Devil, while one centers on a butler going bloodily berserk in a house built by Frank Lloyd Wright. Others feature the discovery of a haunted well filled with the corpses of soldiers killed in a Civil War battle, gruesome revenge, and monsters like the Boo Hag, a skin changer who sucks blood through sleepers’ noses. All these tales, eerie as they are on their own, are cranked up into screamer territory by Hale’s two-tone illustrations, which, with indecent relish and fanatical attention to realistic detail, depict fresh and not-so-fresh corpses, a radiation victim’s rotted face, a man’s buttocks being hacked off with a sword, leering skeletons, chopped-off limbs, and creepy night creatures with big, sharp teeth. The cast of storytellers, horrified onlookers, and all-too-often mutilated victims is racially diverse.

Not all true, but truly nightmarish.