It was time for the grisly world of bedtime stories.

At 7 p.m., an hour before closing time at the Studio City library, 10 preschoolers snuggled into a corner on the floor next to a bookcase full of children’s books. It was time for the grisly world of bedtime stories.

About half the children were in pajamas. Some wore flower patterns and others animals. One boy was in “Lil’ Slugger” Yankee pinstripes. He carried a doll with big dimples on its cheeks and knees and sat in the back on his mother’s lap.

The others rolled out in various poses on large squares of old carpet.

There is evidence that reading to children makes them better readers when they grow up. That’s one reason Children’s Librarian Elizabeth Nelson tells pajama stories every second Monday. The other is that it’s an old tradition.

Television, of course, has altered some elements of the tradition. “We use visuals because children are so visually oriented,” Nelson said.

But some things never change, like the blind retribution that befalls characters who do wrong. Nelson warmed up with what she called a finger story. She put a furry glove on her hand with a monkey’s head stuck on each finger. She sang:

“Five little monkeys jumping on the bed. One falls off and bumps his head. Mom called the doctor and the doctor said, ‘No more monkeys jumping on the bed.’ ”

One of the monkeys’ heads came off. Of course, the others didn’t learn their lesson. Soon, there were none.

Nelson told one peaceful story, about a hungry caterpillar, then moved on to “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.”

She illustrated that story with a large doll that had a clear plastic stomach. She dropped in a replica of each animal the woman ate in the story.

There was quite a pile there when the cow went down.

“What happened?” Nelson asked. “Well, she died, of course. She died, right here on my lap.”

For “The Three Billy Goats and the Troll,” Nelson placed a picture of an ugly old man and a stone bridge on a flannel board.

She didn’t tell the children that a troll is a hideous underworld creature from Norse mythology.

They seemed to know that already.

They looked frightened when Nelson made a deep man’s voice saying, “Who’s that walking on my bridge? I’m coming to swallow you up.”

They smiled when she said in a wee goat’s voice, “Oh, don’t do that. My brother is coming along next. He’ll make a better meal than I will.”

She repeated that line a little louder for the middle-sized goat.

The big goat sounded just as mean as the troll.

“And he flew at the troll and poked his eyes out with his horns, and crushed him to bits, body and bones and tossed him into the river,” Nelson said. “And the old troll has never been seen again. Can you believe that?”

They certainly could. They applauded.

Two days later professional storyteller Mary Stevens stopped by the library to entertain older children of 5 to 12.

Stevens didn’t use any graphic effects. So deep was her spell that if she only looked over her shoulder a witch or an ogre would surely appear.

She was tall and slender and had sat in a child’s chair with her knees apart and her hands folded over a purple madras skirt.

Her voice danced through ages and continents as lightly as a leaf in the wind.

First she disguised a familiar tale in an accent of the American South.

“ ‘Taintcha got my name yit?” a creature with a curly tail asked a maiden when he came to claim her as his own. She did. But she didn’t let on.

“It starts reaching out its big fingers at her,” Stevens said.

The maiden sang its name: “Nimmie nimmie nimmie not. My name is Tom Tit Tot.”

“That sounded just like Rumpelstiltskin,” a smart boy in the front said. It did, Stevens agreed. Then she shifted to a voice dripping with antiquity to tell a tale by John Gardner. It was about a king who met an ogre in the woods and played it at cards to save his life.

“If you win, you can eat me now,” the king said in Stevens’ rendition. “If I win, you can eat me and all my children in seven years.”

“Now, the king was a cheater, so the ogre had to leave the country,” Stevens said. “But that seven years went by like seven days.”

By much the same method the king got a wicked witch to eat the ogre. But, with time running out again, the king’s three children wandered into the woods expecting to be eaten. Instead, they met a hermit with only one eye.

“Why don’t you just turn into sea gulls and fly away,” he suggested.

The two sons did. But the daughter said she would rather die than be a sea gull.

And, of course, the hermit immediately became a handsome prince and the wood became a golden kingdom. He said he was under a spell until he found a person of good values, meaning someone who “knows that a person is better than a sea gull.”

And she lived happily ever after, feeding stale bread to her brothers.

Stevens asked what the children wanted to hear next.

“Can you tell about the pile of eyeballs?” one of them asked.

“I was going to tell ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ ” she said.

“Oh, yes,” a voice called out from the back. It was one of the mothers.

Stevens decided it democratically. The parents all voted for “Beauty and the Beast.”

But there were more children. She told “The Pile of Eyeballs.”

If anyone wants to hear it, Stevens could probably be persuaded to tell it again next Wednesday at 4 p.m.