The Puppet's Payback and Other Chilling Stories
The author of wildly popular ghost stories, Mary Downing Hahn has created a group of tales for fans of her "scary but not too scary" books. Even the stories without actual ghosts are spooky. Each tale turns something ordinary—a pigeon, a white dress, a stranger on the bus, a puppet—into a sinister link to the supernatural. For the human characters, secrets from the past or careless behavior in the present can lead to serious trouble. All the stories have a young person as the central character, so all will resonate with young readers who enjoy the eerie, the creepy, and the otherworldly. In a concluding note, the author talks about how she came to write ghost stories.
Mary Downing Hahn
Mary Downing Hahn (born 1937) is an award winning American author of young adult novels. After graduating college, she worked as an art teacher, a college instructor, and a children's librarian in Prince George's Public Library System. She published her first novel, The Sara Summer, at the age of 41. Since then, she has been a full-time writer. Her ghost story Wait till Helen Comes was the winner of 12 state children's book awards and she received the Scott O'Dell award for her World War II novel Stepping on the Cracks. She currently lives in Columbia, Maryland. (Bowker Author Biography).

