Bedtime Monsters

Like many a little boy before him, Arnold enjoys being ferocious—during the daytime. He fearlessly stomps on (block) buildings to destroy them, and bites the heads off of (animal cracker) lions and tigers and elephants. But after dark, Arnold’s ferocity disappears, and his concern that a monster will come out from under his bed and bite off his toes is dismissed by his mother. “I’m sure he’s just as scared of you as you are of him,” says Mom. “No, he’s not. I’m just a little boy.” Sure enough, the terrible toe biter appears, but it has its own worries: “I’m scared of the horrible tooth gnasher.” In turn, each monster gets under the covers with Arnold, and so it goes until one of them mentions the scariest monster of all, the Arnold. Schneider’s watercolor, pen-and-ink, and colored-pencil illustrations depict Arnold as a solid, ordinary-looking boy, while his imaginary world is outlined in blue around him. The funny monster names and the sight of them crowded into Arnold’s bed will help get scaredy-cats to read this for the first time, and once they’ve seen how the story turns out, they will want this worthy successor to Mercer Mayer’s classic There’s a Nightmare in My Closet read over and over again. susan dove lempke