Years ago, when I was a child, I received two “scary” childrens books from my sister as a gift. Both were pretty thin, and were collections of short stories and the main character was always a kid.
The first book was from Australia I think. It definitely wasn’t American. The stories I can remember are…
A beach town has a whale wash up on shore. Bully steals watch that plays Greensleeves from son of guy in charge of blowing up whale. Whale gets splattered all over town, guy gets blamed but is vindicated when the watch is found in a chunk of whale and starts playing its song, proving that it was the bully who messed around with the explosives.
A crazy yet harmless old man likes to use his industrial freezer to encase dead animals in ice. He has a friend, the kid, who helps him out and takes care of his pet cow. Evil landlord wants the Iceman evicted and the cow killed. The kid takes the cow and rides it across town to save it. When they get back to the freezer, they find the Evil Landlord has fallen through the roof and landed in a vat of water while trying to break in. Evil Landlord is frozen when they get there so they add him to the collection.
And there was also a story about a magic TV remote that can control people. The only detail from that one I can remember is it involved a spaghetti eating contest.
The second book was about kids having encounters with aliens. I recall the cover boasting that these were true stories. I can’t remember if this was another Australian title or if just one of the stories took place in Australia.
Family lives in rural Australia. They begin having all sorts of weird experiences. The parents have to go to town for some reason, leaving the kids at the house. Aliens begin terrorizing the children and doing the standard alien stuff.
Little girl has a heart condition. Strange things begin happening around the house at night. Eventually she’s abducted but the kind aliens fix her heart
A family is at home when the power goes out. They see strange lights outside then they wake up hours later with no memory of what happened after they saw the lights. The kids begin writing in a strange language (spoiler: it was the alien’s language.) The aliens come back again and one of the kids makes them a sandwich.
And there was the standard “friends go camping, get abducted by aliens” story in there too.
I’m 95% sure that the first book I described was from Australia, the second one I’m not too sure about. Both books contain more stories than the ones I described. Those were just the ones I could remember. I figured there are enough international posters here that someone might know these titles.