Nightmare Fuel / The Baby-Sitters Club

How could a series of books about teenage girls starting a babysitting service be scary?

• Claudia sits for a family in which the husband abuses the kids. After Claudia and her mother rescue the children and their mother, Claudia gets a phone call late at night. It's the abusive father, wailing at her to give him back his wife.
• In one of the early books, a serial thief was breaking into houses in nearby towns, making calls to prospective targets and instantly hanging up if anyone answered. The club starts getting calls where the caller hangs up once they answer, and later in the book, Claudia's babysitting and realizes that there's a prowler outside. It's one of the guys from her class, being a moron, and the calls were from another guy who couldn't work up the courage to ask her out, but it's a pretty terrifying situation.
• The whole main conflict of Baby Sitters' Island Adventure. Imagine in real life two 13-year-olds and their younger charges were stranded on an island? Then a preschool-aged child comes down with a high fever?
  • Then Dawn's brother Jeff (both are stranded) theorizes they could be in Nova Scotia, for all they know, and another charge refers to the book Baby Island.
  • And Dawn and Jeff's mother being terrified that even if the kids are found alive, her ex will sue for custody because of the whole incident. When you consider how many perfectly decent and good parents have lost custody for less, it's a very legitimate fear.
  • Mallory narrowly avoids getting shipwrecked since her family had plans to go on a trip.
• Stacey and the Haunted Masquerade is far scarier than most of the mysteries in that the villain is a legitimate escapee from a mental institution who is revenge-crazed.
  • Some of the imagery from this book gets very chilling. When Mr. Rothman tells Stacey what happened at the original Masquerade Dance, he mentions that Liz was wearing an elaborate, but babyish fairy princess costume. When the two enter the gym the next day for a final decoration check, they find a dummy dressed in a similar fairy princess gown hanging from a noose tied to one of the basketball hoops.
• In The Truth About Stacey, the BSC finds Jamie, age 4, outside in the winter without gloves, hat, or scarf, unsupervised and playing in the street, thanks to the negligence of one of the sitters from the rival Babysitters Agency. The BSC manage to get him kitted out and safely into his fenced-in backyard, but all of them (and Mrs. Newton when they tell her) are horrified at what could have happened if they hadn't come by.
• Mary Anne Saves The Day features a little girl coming down with a high fever. Imagine what could've happened if Mary Anne and Dawn weren't clear-headed and capable enough to take care of her.
• How about the bit in Dawn and the Impossible Three where Dawn gives Marnie Barrett a piece of a brownie? Mrs. Barrett never told the sitters that Marnie's allergic to chocolate. If Mallory hadn't swooped in and taken the treat, there could've been a dead (or at least extremely sick) eighteen-month-old...
  • And more! Everyone fears that Buddy Barrett has been kidnapped, only for it to turn out it was his father taking him out for the day because his ex-wife is a moron about the visitation schedule. It's only when Buddy explains that his mother isn't home that his father turns the car around, because he realizes that a babysitter discovering one of her charges is missing will certainly get the police involved. Scary since real-life divorced parents might let their ill feelings towards their spouse take over in such a situation.
    • And still more—while it's understandable that he's annoyed about his ex's flakiness, it doesn't change the fact that he was willing to put her through the panic and terror of not knowing where her child was. Disproportionate Retribution much?
    • Not to mention the fact that Mr. Barrett confesses to police that he was originally going to take all three kids (his plan only changed when he found Buddy playing in the yard alone and realized it would be a lot easier to take just him than to try and locate the girls without his ex-wife seeing him).
    • And yet another possibility. Supposing Buddy had been kidnapped, but thanks to his mother's idiocy, she genuinely thought that his father had picked him up. It would have hours before anyone realized what had happened, by which point the kidnapper would have gotten away.
• The mystery Kristy and the Missing Child is FULL of this. Jake Kuhn goes missing for two days. His recently divorced mother thinks that his father has kidnapped him (Mr. Kuhn had wanted to take Jake with him on a business trip and, per his ex-wife, hates taking no for an answer), and then Kristy briefly contemplates the even more grim possibility that someone other than Jake's father could have kidnapped him. It turns out that Jake wasn't abducted after all, but what really happened is just as unsettling: Jake had ducked into an under-construction house for shelter when it started to rain (he had stopped by the site to pick up some wood for a project) and ended up falling into the basement through the opening in the floor where basement stairs were set to eventually be put in. But there were no stairs yet, not even the basic framework, so he was unable to climb back out and sat down there for multiple days, unable to do anything but yell for help and hope someone would hear him (which Kristy's search party finally did). Fortunately he receives nothing more than a few bumps and bruises, but it's still terrifying nonetheless!
  • Not to mention the thought of what could have happened if the search team didn't think to look there when they did. Without access to water, he probably only had 1-2 days left before it would've been too late.
• In Kristy and the Copycat, Kristy joins the school softball team, and is bullied into taking part in a hazing ritual for the new team members to spray-paint graffiti over an old shed. Subsequently, they find out that a fire started that night and a man was injured, and assume it must have been somehow their fault, since spray paint is flammable and they'd left their paint cans behind. It turns out the fire was actually caused by other students, who deliberately started the fire in order to make themselves look like heroes for putting it out, but it blazed out of control. Either way, it's pretty scary to think about how a seemingly harmless prank can go dangerously wrong.
  • In the same book, Kristy desperately wants to go to the school principal and confess what happened—but the older girls warn that if she or any of the other new players do, they'll make their lives a living hell for as long as they can. To see the fearless Kristy scared out of her mind is unsettling, as is the notion that a group of young teenagers would be so interested in lying and threats.
• One book that deals with Jessi discovering that a fellow student at her ballet school has an eating disorder is very unsettling, given how common eating disorders are among young dancers in real life - even girls of Jessi's age (11-12).
• Mary Anne + 2 Many Babies features an Egg Sitting plot, with Mary Anne coming to class one day to find two of her classmates in tears because they lost their egg in a park. Mary Anne is unsettled when she realizes how easy it would be for a real child to go missing, and it's an effective source of horror for the reader too.
  • As if that weren't bad enough, it happened RIGHT after Mary Anne and Logan very nearly lose their own egg at a movie theater (they only found it after a panicked Logan flagged down an usher, whose flashlight revealed the egg-child to be rolling around under Logan's seat).
• The Mystery Special Babysitters Haunted House involves the girls sitting for a family who have just moved into a magnificent ancestral home in Maine. They discover that the family's "servant" is actually a distant relation scheming to force them out of the house so he and his wife can have it for themselves. At one point, the girls find he wrote down his entire evil plan, and are horrified to discover that said plan includes starting a fire in one of the children's bedrooms.
• Happy Holidays, Jessi is rife with this. The main arc is that before Christmas and Kwanzaa, Jessi, Becca, and Squirt go shopping with Aunt Cecilia and get involved in a car accident on the way home. Squirt ends up in the hospital for the majority of the book, and Jessi thinks it's her fault because she took off Squirt's car seat belt right before the accident (because Aunt Cecilia told her to); this ends up stirring up some major family tensions as the various family members shift from blaming themselves to blaming each other.
• One of the mysteries features Kristy's charge, a young movie star, being the target of various types of sabotage, including breakaway glass being swapped with normal glass (which is mercifully caught before anything could go wrong but everyone is shaken badly) and having his limo's brakes cut (which is just barely prevented from doing real harm). It all turns out to be the work of a Loony Fan of the kid's costar who was mad about the kid "stealing" the spotlight.
• Another mystery has someone setting fires to books throughout the local library—which has just started a program to get kids reading, meaning that there are dozens of small children packed in a place full of highly flammable objects. It gets particularly bad when we find out that the culprit is actually a ten-year-old boy who acted out because his parents forcibly signed him up for the reading program and various other activities, leading him to think that they simply wanted him and his sister out of the way (a perfectly valid thought for a child). That a fifth-grader was able to devise a plan to burn books, acquire the lighter fluid, and was willing to risk lives... it's chilling.
  • In the same novel, Mary Anne (who narrates the book) suffers from horrible nightmares involving fires burning out of control. The other girls admit they're being similarly affected by the trouble, losing concentration and sleep over their anxiety. (Much, much Harsher in Hindsight where Mary Anne is concerned.)
• Baby Sitters Beware! is one of the few books where the girls are in real, true danger. Between a fire being started at Claudia’s house, Stacey nearly getting hit by a car, threatening phone calls being made to multiple girls, and the climax that occurs at Shadow Lake…it is one of the most terrifying books.