Superhero Bedtime Stories
A superhero story is the worst-shaped story there is for bedtime. Everything in the genre builds to a fight at the end, which means the loudest page is the last one, which means you have just spent ten minutes carefully winding a child up. That is why so many of these end with somebody standing on the landing at nine o’clock.
Reversing it fixes it. Put the rescue early, keep it small, and give the last third to the part every superhero story skips: going home, being tired, hanging the cape up. It also helps to pick a better power. Flight and strength are for the middle of the day — the useful one at bedtime is being the person who notices things, which is quiet, and which a five-year-old can actually practise. Below is a complete one, free.
The Night Shift
A free story to read aloud tonight
Sena’s power was hearing very small sounds, which everybody agreed was the least impressive power on the whole street, right up until the evening the Mercer twins’ kitten got behind the wall.
Nobody else could hear it. Four adults stood in a garden being certain there was nothing there while Sena stood very still with her eyes shut and pointed at a spot two bricks up from the ground, and said, “There. It’s bored now, it’s stopped being frightened.”
It took eleven minutes and a torch and somebody’s father’s arm up to the shoulder, and then there was a kitten, extremely unbothered, and a great deal of fuss that Sena stood at the edge of.
After that the evening simply carried on. She walked home. The streetlights came on one at a time along the road, which they do in an order if you ever watch for it, and she watched for it.
Her cape went on the hook by the door where it always went, and it was only a bath towel, and everybody in the house knew it was only a bath towel, and nobody had ever once said so.
In bed she listened to the small sounds of her own house — the boiler, somebody on the stairs, a bird outside doing something quiet and pointless — and they were all so completely ordinary that she was asleep before she got to the end of them.
Aren’t superhero stories too exciting for bedtime?
They are if they are built the usual way, with the big moment at the end. The fix is the order: the rescue happens early and small, and the last pages are the hero coming home. Every Z Tales story is built to that curve, so the final page is always the quietest one, whatever happened on page three.
Can you make a story about a specific superhero my child loves?
No — those characters belong to their studios and we do not write them. What you can do is better anyway: your child is the hero, by name, with a power you make up together. In our experience a child who is handed their own name and their own power rarely asks for the licensed one back.
What age are superhero bedtime stories best for?
Roughly 3–9, peaking around 4–7. Younger children want the power itself and very little plot; from about six they start wanting the hero to have a problem worth solving. Personalized stories adjust the sentence length and the amount of story to the age you pick.