By Heather Camlot
By day, Joel Sutherland goes about his job as director of community and service development at the Whitby Public Library with a constant, disarming smile and a quick quip or bad dad joke to brighten people’s day. He’s funny, kind, and incredibly personable. His mission, he says, is to do anything and everything to ensure that everyone, especially children, have an amazing and memorable time at the library.
But in the dead of night (and on lunch breaks, weekends, planes, dad-chauffeuring duty…), Joel turns to his other job – scaring the bejeebers out of young readers. We’re talking creepy, talking antique dolls. An abandoned house with killer ghosts. A vengeful clown at an old amusement park. And those are just the scenarios Joel made up for his novels Night of the Living Dolls, Summer’s End, and Screamers, to name a few.
He also puts the chills in children with true terrifying tales from across Canada. Like an abandoned mental hospital in Coquitlam, BC. The Copper Coulee Casino in Medicine Hat, Alberta. The Centaur Theatre in Montreal. Dobbin’s Garden on Bell Island, Newfoundland. “Canada is scary,” says Joel. “We have no shortage of ghost stories.” The author-librarian began writing Scholastic Canada’s non-fiction Haunted Canada series after Pat Hancock, the original author, retired.
“When I was asked to write Haunted Canada 4, I was afraid I wouldn’t come up with enough stories.” Each book has about 25 alarming accounts of things that go bump in the night. “Very quickly I learned that wasn’t a fear I needed to have.” Haunted Canada 12: More Frightening True Tales was published in 2023, and Joel is working on book 13. Because there has to be a book 13, what with the number associated with bad luck and superstition.
Librarian Superpowers
Joel reads constantly to uncover the next Haunted Canada horror. He uses his “librarian superpowers” – digging
through archives – to find first-hand accounts in out-of-print books and old newspapers. “Stories that have been lost,” he calls them.
The non-fiction series only contains bona fide stories, no urban legends. Joel follows up each lead with research, interviews, and visits. “If there isn’t enough there to compel me to believe it’s real, then I won’t include it,” the award-winning author says. “I need to turn into a believer.” Joel is certain there are things out there, things that can’t be explained, even though he has never personally seen a ghost.
“I’ve tried! I’ve gone to so many locations I’ve written about, gone late at night. I don’t know if they’re avoiding me on purpose, if they are offended that I’m exposing their secrets.”
Goosebumps and Pinpricks
He did have one seemingly excellent, blood-curdling opportunity to encounter a spectre or two…or more. Joel was working at the Georgina Public Library in Ontario when a woman named Toni came by asking for some help. She wanted to know the history of her house. The staff called Joel. As he spoke with Toni, his arms prickled. This was the scariest house he’d ever heard about.
“Most times, the ghosts aren’t trying to harm people; they just haven’t moved on,” he explains. “This house, the ghosts were decidedly not nice, definitely of the evil variety.” We’re talking – spoiler alert – a teenager who bleeds tears out of his eyeless eye sockets and a dripping wet woman who pinned Toni’s son against a wall.
When Joel asked why she didn’t move, Toni replied that the ghosts wouldn’t let her. Her one potential sale fell through – when the buyer ran out of the house like a bat out of hell. By the time she spoke to Joel, she had been living in the house for over 25 years. That list of previous owners, by the way, was super-long. Since the 1950s, most people lived there no more than two to three months.
As for that opportunity to see dead men walking? Toni extended an invitation. “I said no thanks,” Joel admits. “I kind of regret that now.”
Every Picture Tells a Story
The tale “You Can Never Leave” is in Haunted Canada 7: Chilling True Tales. It will also be adapted for a future Haunted Canada graphic novel. The third volume of the four-novella series came out in September. Because if readers weren’t already scared stiff picturing apparitions in their minds while reading Joel’s books, they can now see those apparitions in all their ghostly glory!
Graphic adaptations of middle-grade books have exploded over the last few years, according to Publishers Weekly. Not only do they attract a new audience, but once invested in a series, those readers tend to search out the original format as well.
Joel has really taken to writing the graphic novel scripts. While he stays true to the original stories, it gives him a second chance to make them more exciting, entertaining, and of course scary.
Scary isn’t something Joel has to worry about with the talented Canadian and Indigenous illustrators who have contributed to the graphic novel series so far. Hannah Barrett, David Bishop, Mike Feehan, Sara Harding, Maya McKibbin, Jackie Reynolds, Josh Rosen, Matt Salisbury, Jenn Woodall – suffice it to see they all excel at depicting horror in full colour, from bloody necks to rotted faces to macerated skin. “The illustrations do so much of the heavy lifting,” Joel says. Yes, yes they do.
From Chilling to Charming
Joel has also undertaken yet another new-to-him format – picture books. Illustrated by Terry Pearce and published in time for Halloween, The Scariest House on the Street is a sweet treat for three- to eight-year-olds – and anyone else who prefers their ghosts and goblins cute rather than cutthroat.
Joel flipped the script on the traditional haunted house, imagining what that house would look like in a monster world. On Shivers Street, that petrifying place at the dead end of the road is the renovated house with a freshly mowed lawn, welcome mat, lemon-scented air, and no rats. “It’s horrifying,” proclaims Willow the witch, one of the four central friends.
From there, Joel says the fear-of-the-unknown tale wrote itself – with a healthy dose of the author-librarian’s killer sense of humour. For example, the Halloween party games that confuse the monster quartet: Pin the Limbs on the Zombie with “cardboard instead of real parts” and Bobbing for Piranhas using “apples instead of flesh-eating fish.”
Joel’s “real-life monsters” – Charles, 16, Bronwen, 15, and Fiona, 10 – also feature in The Scariest House on the
Street. While they all enjoy being in the story, Fiona was the most excited. She asked Joel to read the book night after night. The dad-daughter bonding time, however, took a terrible turn.
“After a few reads, she started to count how many lines of dialogue she got. It seems she didn’t get as many,” says Joel. “I had to explain that her character steals the show in the pictures.” Did that actually work? “No, she’s far too smart and perceptive for that.” But he believes he’s made things right in the Christmas-themed sequel.
Despite the oversight, the picture book is a wish fulfilled. “I love the power of picture books. You’re hooking a reader from such a young age.” Something Joel knows firsthand.
A Storybook Beginning
To this day, he remembers author-illustrator Phoebe Gilman visiting his class and reading The Balloon Tree. He still has his signed copy. “Little moments like that paved the path for me as a future author-librarian.
So did growing up in a family of readers. One of Joel’s earliest memories is lying on his father’s stomach as he read the newspaper. His dad was also big on novels, while his mother read non-fiction. His middle brother was a huge fantasy reader, and his oldest brother was into Stephen King. Joel admits he may have started to read those Stephen King novels a little too young: “But I was reading, that’s the important part!”
Joel graduated from film studies at York University in Toronto, but decided film wasn’t the career for him. He worked at a bookstore in Durham Region, Ontario, where he currently lives, and considered teaching or publishing. Colleen, his then-girlfriend and now wife, saw a summer position at the Ajax Public Library and suggested he apply. Although Joel didn’t get the job, the library later hired him to temporarily fill in as an information assistant.
“On Day One I realized, oh, this is what I was supposed to do!” He went back to school to pursue a Master’s in Library and Information Studies through Aberystwyth University in Wales.
Books Start with Boo
While working at the library, he also wrote his own stories, something he learned he was quite good at back in grade five or six.
“I was at a sleepover with a couple of friends,” he reminisces. “I told one of the classic cliché stories, but I got really into it, describing as many details and sound effects as I could come up with and adding long creepy pauses and even scary voices to amplify it. It went so well that at the end, one of my friends reached into his pocket and handed me a dollar. ‘That’s for telling the scariest story I have ever heard.’ It was the first time I was ever paid for telling a scary story.”
It certainly wasn’t the last. As a children’s librarian, Joel worked with young readers of all ages, giving him a front-row seat to which books were popular and to gaps in the market. He also got to host author and illustrator visits. At one event, he made a connection with a Scholastic Canada representative who was kind enough to pass his work along to the house’s editorial team.
Joel kept working on ideas and eventually got his first book deal. Published by Scholastic Canada in 2010, Be a Writing Superstar has little to do with spirits and spectres. The writing guide combines games, activities and tips from the creative writing workshops Joel led at the library with funny children’s author interviews he had done for the library’s newsletter.
Keeping Kids Up at Night
Four years later, in 2014, came Joel’s first Haunted Canada book. Since then, he’s had at least one book published every year – be it non-fiction, the Haunted Canada fiction series, the standalone middle-grade and YA novels, or the recent graphic novels or picture book – 22 in total.
While he uses the storytelling principles he learned in film school, Joel has also learned that realism among the otherworldly is of utmost importance. “It helps you cheer for your character going through supernatural stuff if they are facing challenges your readers have faced as well, dealing with a bully at school or parents who aren’t getting along or missing a shot in the soccer game… anything that keeps kids up at night.”
That realism not only connects young readers with the characters, but emboldens them in their own lives. Scary stories help kids make sense of a scary world in a safe way and provide the tools to face real terror and overcome challenges, Joel explains. “As a kid, reading scary stories made me feel a little less alone, a little more powerful, a little more well-equipped to deal with things. I got through the story and so did the character.”
“There is a lot of value and power in scary stories for kids.” Who would know this better than a horror author and librarian?
Now to get past the terrifying cover of Screamers.
Heather Camlot is a journalist and editor, and the author of Beyond Words: The Meaning of Signs and Symbols and the forthcoming Have a Bite: How Food Connects Us in November 2026.