Book excerpt: Get Ready to be Spooked! It was eleven o'clock at night. Peter was in bed on the second floor of the old house where he lived alone. It had gotten so chilly, he went downstairs to turn up the heat. As Peter was on his way back to bed, a black dog ran down the stairs. "Where did you come from?" Peter said. He had never seen the dog before. . . . Welcome to the frightening world of Scary Stories, a collection of folklorist Alvin Schwartz's most alarming tales of horror, dark revenge, and supernatural events of all time, with spine-tingling illustrations by renowned artist Brett Helquist.