The thrill of a sleepover becomes sheer terror as kids voice their greatest fears into existence in this cheeky, vividly cinematic tale by New York Times bestselling author Edgar Cantero. Lights out.It’s bad enough that its venom-dripping chelicerae can slice through flesh like warm butter. Worse? It’s right there under the bunk. It’s a fact now. To make it through the night, the children must … night, the children must obey the rules: don’t get out of bed, stay out of the shadows, and don’t wake the beast. But as the threats multiply, so do the rules of survival. And with the safety of dawn still hours away, the fun is just beginning.
Edgar Cantero’s There’s a Giant Trapdoor Spider under Your Bed is part of Dark Corners, a collection of seven heart-stopping short stories by bestselling authors who give you so many new reasons to be afraid. Each story can be read in a single sitting. Or, if you have the nerve, you can listen all by yourself in the dark.
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An amazing, quick and eerie read!
Edgar Cantero is a GENIUS. Seriously. He has an incredible ability to write children who don’t read like pastiches, to write stories that are original and utterly compelling, and to do it all with a unique sense of darkness, style, sly wit, and delicious wry sensibility that resonates with me like nobody’s business…
You never know what’s real, what’s imagined, and what’s a lie until the very end. You never know if those distinctions even matter until the very end (and even sometimes don’t know after). Yet there’s never confusion or a sense of misdirection for the sake of generating attention or shock value – every word feels deliberately and carefully chosen to further the incredibly intricate stories, whether the story is short like this one or longer like his novels. It’s a brilliant writing style and grabs me every single time.
I generally dislike short stories; there’s never enough characterization for me and I rarely connect with the tale enough to truly enjoy them (unless they exist in already-established worlds populated by characters I already know and like). This is a short story. It is incredibly, perfectly Cantero-like. I LOVED IT. And if that doesn’t tell you what a master he is at storytelling, nothing else I can say will!
A sleepover grows “deadly” as the children imagine crazier and crazier things.
It starts out strong with the dialogue between the two boys at the start, and there is a bit of suspense with the spider being real or not .. but when the girls come into the room the story just gets outta control and hard to follow. I stopped bothering to try and make sense of things and just powered on to finish the story.
The Harry Potter references were just awful for me, as someone who isn’t into that. A few would be fine, but just over and over… ugh. One line made me cringe and groan out loud… “Ian shrugged Ianly.” Come on …
I still have no idea what happened, if any of it was real, or their imagination, and I just didn’t like it enough to ponder anymore about it.
Rating: 2.0/5.0
Genre:
Novella + Horror???
I thought this whole series was done for adults. Wrong! This story is made for children and I can’t even term it as a horror. The story is about a small group of children having a sleepover and playing together by imagining things! One of them, of course, is what the title suggests!
I felt this story was a mess. The Harry Potter references seemed to be forced and not interesting to me even being a fan of the series. The characters were not interesting enough. They were just names and not unique characters. What is worse than all the above was the audiobook narrator who used the same voice for all the characters. I had to quit the audiobook from the first page and read it myself because she made a boring story to become an awful one!
This is the third book in the series and so far my least favorite among the ones I read.
Available on Kindle Unlimited
There’s a Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed by Edgar Cantero and narrated by Amy Landon is a fun audible about kids having a sleepover then things start happening. Is it their imagination or is it real? Loads of creativity! Enjoyed it a lot and the narration was terrific!