Nightmare Fuel / Weenies

• In "The Touch", a girl accidentally breaks something in a flea market that had a sign not to touch it, and quickly leaves. Feeling afraid that night, she takes out her childhood stuffed toy rabbit to sleep with. In the morning, it's gone. She finds out that when she touches any object she loved, she might feel a tingle; after that, if she stops looking at it, it will disappear. Later, her mom hugs her as she's crying, and she feels a tingle. The phone rings and her mom goes to answer it. The girl chases after her and tries to call her back, but her mom rounds a corner and then is nowhere to be found. Then the girl sits down and cries, and as she hugs herself, she feels a tingle. It ends there.
  • Everything about this curse is terrifying. Having the things (and people!) you love disappear, knowing that you caused it by touching them (thus activating the curse, which is felt as a tingle), and then letting them out of your sight (triggering the disappearance). Imagine the dread once you realize what's going on, and touch something (or someone!) only to feel a tingle. Even if you did nothing but stare at them all day, you'd eventually have to sleep.
• There was another story about four girls playing a new video game, and three of them lost. And they disappeared. The story concluded with the last one fighting the final boss and just about to die, so she pressed the pause button. And remained in that position forevermore (implied).
• Highlights include the substitute teacher who is really an escaped lunatic who electrocutes the class, and the positively terrifying "Hide", in which horrible Alien-like monstrosities burst out from inside cows, and the little brother is the only one who can see them. In the end, he points to the big brother and whispers "Inside," then runs away.
• "The Billion Legger", a story where Hundreds of centipedes cover the kid's ceiling, walls, and floor and then all attack him at once.
• One where a teenage girl takes the toddler she's baby-sitting to the park. They're the only ones there, until a kid drops out of a tube slide. The girl dismisses this, thinking she just didn't see him go in, but then another kid pops out, and another, and another, and another... until an entire army of Creepy Children show up, swarm the girl, carry her to the slide, throw her in, and she lands on top of what can only be described as a giant maggot that absorbs her for food so the maggot can make more children.
• The Campfire Weenies one, in which a boy, in an attempt to conquer his fear of clowns, watches one remove his makeup only to become a horrifically frightening monster in the first chapter. In the last one, a monster is trying to escape from the Hall of Forgotten Monsters by instilling his story in the mind of a writer, and the words he's putting into the writer's mind are those that began the chapter. And, of course, he described quite brutally how if anyone even thinks his name, he will be able to come for them, snatch them out of their beds, and doom them to eternal torment. And his name...? Wanderban.

  • Even worse is the extras section, where the author put little things about where he got the ideas from. He says that the final idea just came to him, as if someone were whispering in his ear...

• In one story a kid catches a fairy while hunting for fireflies. Yep, that kind of fairy, death threats, hunger for live meat, very horribly sharp little teeth and all. It eats the bugs in the jar and tells him that if he gives it some carbon it can make a diamond in exchange for its freedom. He's smart and doesn't want to open the jar and let it out while he puts some charcoal in. Then he gets stupid and gives it some pencil lead by sliding it through the air holes. The story ends when he comes back from school and he finds that the fairy used the diamond to cut its way out of the jar. He concludes that he doesn't intend to fall asleep anymore.
• David Lubar says he likes to end each collection with what he thinks is the scariest story. One example is I Can't Quite Put a Finger On It, which has a kid facing a monster that slowly eats your limbs that turns out to have the power to make you forget it's doing so.
• One thing about this series that's scarier than most others out there is how some of the villains who receive their gruesome demise are little more than average bullies. Hell some aren't even that, they're just rude. Simply being a jackass in these stories can get you horribly killed.
• In "The Language of Beasts", a girl who doesn't like other people saves a woman from wandering into traffic. It turns out the woman is a witch, and offers her the reward of her heart's deepest wish. The girl loves animals, and so wishes to be able to understand their thoughts. She eagerly runs to a local dog that she loves to play with...and hears him start mocking her for being ugly. Then a cat who she showers with love insults her odor. Then the birds flying by call her stupid. The poor girl runs to her bedroom and hides...and the spiders in her wall, dust mites in her carpet, and crickets outside the window join in the cruelty. She's essentially going to spend the rest of her life being endlessly bullied and mocked, constantly surrounded by nasty voices that she can never escape no matter how she tries.
• The twist of "The Wild Blue Yonder". The protagonist's descriptions of the sounds from the blender are pretty horrible.

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