6 More Picture Books for Halloween
Dead's dead. But I'm alive. And I could use some boots.
Last year we recommended a batch of Halloween books and this year we’ve got six more, with a little more time to track down copies from your library or favorite used-book seller. Happy Halloween!
Deep dives on great picture books are here.
We recommend picture books here.
The Looking at Picture Books Shop is here.
We’re doing our first Looking at Picture Books live event, where we’ll be… looking at picture books… live. It’s at Sullaluna Bookshop in New York City on Wednesday, September 24. Get your tickets here.
The Bump in the Night, by Anne Rockwell
Anne Rockwell, one of picture books’ overlooked greats, published hundreds of books about nearly everything, but many of her best were about transportation or folk tales. The Bump in the Night is a folk tale. It uses the classic motif of a fearless boy who spends the night in a haunted castle, where a body comes down the chimney in pieces — ATU 326 for all the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index superfans out there. (“Dauntless Little John,” in Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales, is one of my favorite versions of this tale.)
The hero of Rockwell’s tale is Toby the Tinker, who was “not afraid of anything.” I love the way Rockwell draws but a lot of the joy here is in her writing. She’s in early-reader mode — this is a book designed for young children to read on their own. But her style makes it a pleasure to share aloud. Rockwell takes the limitations imposed by early readers and uses them to fuel her storytelling. The simplicity and clarity of her language is sometimes suspenseful and sometimes funny (horror’s two main gears). And the repetition makes her prose musical. Here is chapter one:
Long ago there was a castle.
It was old.
It was cold.
It was gray.
And it was haunted.There was a ghost
in the castle.
There was a ghost
who went
BUMP in the night.
The ghost howled too.No one went in the castle.
No one walked
in its garden.
No one picked
olives or oranges
from the trees
in its garden.
It was a haunted castle.
The paperback has a better cover, in my opinion:
But good luck finding a copy that doesn’t arrive on your doorstep in pieces, trapping you in some metafictional ATU-326 nightmare.
—MAC