ALA Booklist

Children taken hostage by trees, malicious fairies, and spirits calling from the grave: these scenarios and more appear in this creepily sinister collection of short stories designed to disturb your slumber. Painstakingly gathered by the book's "curators" (who supposedly discovered them while out adventuring), the extraordinary tales are presented in themed sections (cake, luck, love, etc.), much like the objects in old curio cabinets. Pen-and-ink illustrations, letters from the curators, and a few extra tales are interspersed between chapters, adding bonus horrors to the collection. Though drawing heavily on folk- and fairy-tale traditions, these tales are neither moralistic nor cautionary. While a few contain lessons that can be learned, the majority exist simply to give readers a fright or chill. And this they do quite well. Not for the faint of heart, this curious collection of stories will haunt and, at times, horrify and are best read by flashlight.

Horn Book (Wed Apr 01 00:00:00 CDT 2015)

Illustrated by Alexander Jansson. Four "curators"--Bachmann, Catmull, Legrand, and Trevayne--fill their Cabinet of Curiosities museum with objects of wonder as well as the (often unearthly) tales behind them. The stories are remarkable both for their uniformly high quality and for their distinctness from one another; the abundant atmospherics, including occasional stark black-and-white illustrations, provide a unifying sense of dread.

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

This collection of 36 short dark fantasies from Bachmann, Catmull, Legrand, and Trevayne aspires to sit on the same shelf as Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and succeeds admirably. The conceit is that the authors are curators of the eponymous cabinet, a magical museum that houses the often-dangerous souvenirs and stories they bring back from their Indiana Jones-like adventures. Among the many delicious tales are Bachmann's "Johnny Knockers," which concerns the fate of a whaling ship after its crew discovers a small boy inside a whale; Legrand's "Mirror, Mirror," which tells of a nasty preteen who looks into a mirror and finds more than she bargained for; Trevayne's "The Circus," the story of a traveling circus's horrifyingly bad luck; and Catmull's "Dark Valentine," which illustrates why you don't want your dead girlfriend contacting you by cellphone. Many of these are moral tales in which nasty children or adults die horribly; others, though, feature perfectly nice people who meet similarly gruesome ends. Readers who enjoy their Halloween chills all year round will find this anthology a delight. Ages 8-12. (May)

School Library Journal (Tue Jul 01 00:00:00 CDT 2014)

Gr 5-7 Chilling, thrilling, and occasionally startlingly bleak, this collection of short stories is arranged through an ingenious conceit: the tales are housed in the imaginary cabinet of the title. The tales which live in this cabinet of the strange and sinister have been collected (written) by four different curators (authors): Stefan Bachmann, Katherine Catmull, Claire Legrand, and Emma Trevayne. Themes are introduced through letters sent back and forth between the curators, each of whom assumes a different persona, which helps build a world around the stories themselves. Fans of shivery tales will find much to appreciate here, from dolls who love their playmates a little too much to luck that comes at a high price. Taken as a whole, however, a dark, almost nihilistic feeling pervades the stories, bringing the potential audience into question. Short enough to be read aloud, the book invites comparisons to Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (HarperCollins, 1981), though readers may leave this cabinet with lingering feelings of dread, rather than the cathartic jolt of a jump scare. Elisabeth Gattullo Marrocolla, Darien Library, CT