Xavier Garza

Have you ever been too scared to sleep with the lights off? Were you frightened by a scratching sound inside of your walls or the beady red eyes and knotted green fingers of a duende? In his first collection of scary stories, Xavier Garza asks us these questions. The stories in this collection curdle with the creepy and crawling characters of traditional folklore. These stories brim with the supernatural: the mysterious disappearance of children who...

Everybody is fighting in sixth-grader Maximilian's world as his elderly aunts battle for the Queen Bingo trophy, his masked uncles wrestle for the tag-team title of the world, and his sweetheart and the "new girl" battle for Max's heart.

"Nikko's mother wants him to stop jumping on his bed, but he's not jumping on his bed, as he tried to convince her. Instead there are luchadors, masked wrestlers, trying to fight him one at a time. In the end, of course, Nikko is the winner: the great and mightly Nikko!"--

"Little Damian is getting ready for bed, and the spooky monster called La Llorona is hollering up a storm outside his bedroom window. But he's not afraid. "You can't scare me, silly Llorona," says Damian, 'and neither can your monster friends!' When evil-looking witch owls fly around his room and little green duendes, or goblins, make creepy noises under his bed, he's still not frightened. Not even a little bit. The Donkey Lady, a chupacabras and...

After hearing about their grandfather's boyhood encounter with the Chupacabras, a green, winged creature with glowing eyes, Juan and his cousin Luz decide to find out if the story could be true.

When Carlitos attends a wrestling match in Mexico City with his father, his favorite masked-wrestler has eyes that are strangely familiar.

Seventh-grader Joe López, a promising artist, stands up to a bully and survives, thanks to his Grandpa Jesse's advice about "la lucha." A bilingual flip book with Garza's black and white sketches depicting bullies, heroes, and the roosters that Joe loves to draw.