Are You Afraid Of the Dark? Ghostly Tales

For those young teens who don't go directly from Walt Disney to Chucky the malevolent doll, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, regularly seen on the Nickelodeon cable channel, offers some good chills and frights without buckets of blood and severed limbs. This compilation contains two episodes which feature ghosts: "The Tale of the Frozen Ghost" and "The Tale of the Shiny Red Bicycle." In the former, a young teen named Daphne (Melissa Joan Hart, who also stars on Nick's Clarissa Explains It All) has to baby-sit a pampered boy at his weird great aunts' spooky old house. Strange sounds and even stranger sights lead the kids to the solution of a tragic mystery and the laying to rest of a forlorn spirit. In the second episode, teenager Mike Buckley (Matthew Edison) loses his best friend in a drowning accident and has obsessive nightmares for several years until the ghost of his best friend returns to warn Mike of impending doom. Mike gets a second chance to save a life and restore sanity to his own. Both programs use the framing device of a storytelling group called The Midnight Society, whose members presumably sneak out of the house every Friday night at midnight without getting caught (ha!) and tell each other scary tales. For television fare, these stories are fairly standard in terms of both production and writing. However, not everyone has access to cable, the programs are inexpensive, and as any glance at the young adult section of a bookstore will readily confirm, horror is big-time popular with YA's. Recommended. (R. Pitman)