Table of Contents:

• An Accident at the Pole
• Advice
• Ages of a Toad
• All Families Are Not the Same
• An Angry Poem by a Dragon’s Mother
• At War with Wood
• Auntie
• A Bad Cat
• Balance
• Baseball is Safer
• The Bear with One Green Ear
• Being Me
• Better Than Money
• A Beverage with Antlers
• Boogeyman
• The Cabbage Feels No Pain
• Cats in Spats
• Crime and Punishment
• A Cure for Ugly
• Dangerous Music
• Dinner with Jilly
• Do Trees Sneeze?
• Dogs and Hogs
• Fashion-Plate Fido
• The Fearful Bee
• Food Psychos
• Frankenbunny
• Handyman
• Head Number Two
• Horse Thief
• I Don’t Share
• If I Were a Potato
• Insults
• An Interesting Fact About Dogs
• Listen to the Wind
• A Long Day of Rhyming
• Lucky Skunk
• The Man With Four Eyes
• Mary Thinks She Wants a Puppy
• The Monstrous Broccoli Excuse
• My Words
• The Paper Doorway
• Peace Through Hopping
• Peg-Leg Zeg
• The Pig with Pride
• Plurals
• Poem by My Dog
• The Prettiest Butterfly I Will Ever See
• Princess with a Tail
• Rain
• Red Hair
• The Reliable Bunny
• Rocks
• Rumor
• Safe Household Accidents
• The Seasons of a Toad
• The Shark in the Park
• A Short Trip
• Sick
• Silly
• A Skeleton’s Hotel
• Snowland
• So There
• Stars, Mars, and Chocolate Bars
• A Strange Day on the Farm
• Them and Us
• Thinking About Me
• Those Weird Guys in Nursery Rhymes
• The Threat
• Toast and Jam
• Up
• Wally the Werewolf
• The Wart
• What Will We Do, What Will We Do?
• What I Like
• Why?
• Why Good Manners Matter
• Why I Find It So Hard to Learn
• Why Most People Prefer Cats and Dogs
• Wishes
• The Woggle Wrangler
• You Get the Pickle You Ask For
• The Young Musician – Or Maybe Thug

From The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror edited by Stephen Jones
Carroll & Graf, 2002, p3:
”One Door Away From Heaven by Dean Koontz had 500,000 copies in print after three printings. It involved a woman on a quest to save a disabled child from the girl’s strange stepfather, who believed that she would be taken away by aliens before her tenth birthday. The Paper Doorway: Funny Verse and Nothing Worse was a young-adult poetry collection by Koontz, illustrated by Phil Parks. In Britain, Headline published a paperback omnibus of Koontz’s Watchers/Mr. Murder.”

Nominated for an award from The Children’s Literature Association of Utah in 2003. It lost to Take Me Out of the Bathtub and Other Silly Dilly Songs by Alan Katz, illustrated by David Catrow.