What if the stories we tell before sleep aren’t meant to quiet the dark, but to awaken it — to understand it, and to open a child’s mind to wonder?
These are bedtime stories for adults who still remember the shadows.
Bedtime Stories That Will Terrify Children may sound like a provocation—but it isn’t, not really. These stories aren’t about horror for horror’s sake. They’re about the way children actually see the world—alive with mystery, shadow, and the possibility that magic and menace coexist just beyond the edges of the nightlight.
Children already sense that darkness holds both danger and wonder. What they want from stories isn’t protection from fear, but fairness in it—a sense that even in the strangest tale, things make sense somehow. That’s what these stories offer: not terror, but truth told through the eyes of imagination unafraid to look into the dark.
“I wrote this book for my children. Not because I had the answers—but because the stories might ask the right questions.”~Randolph B. Schiffer
AUTHOR's NOTES (condensed)
In the spring of 1990, my wife and I were told that our three-year-old son, Brenton, had acute lymphocytic leukemia. At that time, survival was uncertain, and treatment was long, painful, and unforgiving. We could not control the disease — but we believed we might help him endure it.
Small children do not fear death; they fear abandonment. So we restructured our lives to ensure that Brenton was never alone. And when doctors later warned us he might be relapsing, I began telling him stories at bedtime — stories of danger and courage, fear and resilience. In them, I reversed the roles I wished I could have reversed in real life: the father became the one in peril; the child, the witness to strength.
These eight stories are not gentle tales. They are stories of suspense and moral reckoning, of animals and ancient spirits, of cowardice and bravery. They were told by candlelight during the hardest year of our lives, in the hope that story might fortify where medicine could not.
The doctors were wrong. Brenton survived. He is now grown, with a child of his own.
I have written these stories down in the hope that somewhere, another child — and another family — might find in them what we did: not comfort, but courage.
— Randolph B. Schiffer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer
Author Neurologist Psychiatrist Marine Corps Veteran
Dr. Randolph B. Schiffer is a Yale graduate, Marine Corps veteran, and retired physician who made his mark as the only U.S. doctor listed in Best Doctors in America for both neurology and psychiatry. Over his 35-year medical career, he held senior academic roles and co-founded the American Neuropsychiatric Association. He is also a widely published medical researcher.
Since retiring in 2010, Dr. Schiffer has turned to writing, blending medicine, memory, and myth. His literary works include David and Lee Roy: A Viet Nam Story, Goodbye Stories from University Hospital, and the forthcoming Bedtime Stories to Terrify Children (Omera Press)—a poignant and eerie collection drawn from stories he once told his children.
He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and writes from his cabin on Bois Blanc Island, Lake Huron.
Randolph B. Schiffer has lived many lives-Marine, physician, psychotherapist, professor-and now, storyteller.A graduate of Yale College and the University of Michigan Medical School, Dr. Schiffer's career spanned both battlefield and brain. He served as a Marine infantry officer during the Vietnam War, led departments in prestigious medical institutions, and co-founded the American Neuropsychiatric Association. At one time, he was the only physician listed in Best Doctors in America for both adult neurology and psychiatry.In 2010, he stepped away from medicine to write. His literary voice-measured, unflinching, and strangely tender-blends memory with myth, and mortality with mischief. From their cedar cabin in Bois Blanc Lake, Michigan, he writes in view of the lake that has shaped so many of his stories.He also resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife, Dr. Lynn S. Bickley, closer to his sons and family in Dallas.
