The New Mother

by Lucy Clifford

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

Heather Ordover (of the CraftLit Podcast) narrates this classic scary bedtime tale by Lucy Clifford, first published in her 1882 collection of children's stories, “The Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise”—a tale which best-selling author Neil Gaiman acknowledges was the inspiration for “Coraline.”

In it, two well-behaved children, who live with their mother and their baby sibling in the forest, come upon a strange little girl, who tells them that she has a tiny man and woman in a box, and will only show them to naughty children. The children return home, and do their best to be naughty despite their love for their mother. The mother, despondent, tells the children that if they don't behave she will have to go away, and be replaced by a "new mother" with glass eyes and a wooden tail. In previous years, the story was adapted into the shorter story "The Drum", as featured in Alvin Schwartz's classic creepy folklore collection “More Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”

Publisher: Spoken Realms