Witches, ghouls and monsters are never hard to spot in this most spooky of literary seasons, but eerie fiction nowadays isn’t just a matter of clanking chains and bumps in the night. The new classics of the genre offer a wider range of effects than merely the delicious shiver or horrified shudder. There’s laughter amid the tombs, love among the rattling skeletons and big ideas smuggled in with the candy.
Having written for Horrible Histories, the fun-fact children’s television show that’s equally adored by adults, Gabby Hutchinson Crouch is well placed to extract giggles from ghastliness. Wish You Weren’t Here (Farrago, £8.99) sees a quarrelling family of professional ghost hunters tackle a seaside town ravaged by the undead. Summoned by the panicking lady vicar to banish a poltergeist in the vestry, Brenda and Richard Rook and their children, Darryl and Charity, head for dreary, out-of-season Coldbay, to find the place infested with revenants.
It’s far more than they’re used to dealing with. Charity, being adopted, doesn’t share the family trait of being able to see ghosts, but she’s very effective at “popping” them, as long as she’s constantly fuelled with chips. Darryl’s accountant husband, Janusz, has no supernatural skills but helps keep costs down by bulk-buying ritual candles from “Wax Lyrical’s Christmas scents range” in the Boxing Day sales.
The Rook children may be old enough to be married but they still bicker like teenagers. Their stock in trade is a beguiling mix of skill and bodging. Part of the family arsenal is a demon named Murzzzz, but even he is bamboozled by a supernatural force that propels Janusz into a stained-glass window. Not through it; into it. Exuberantly satirical, it’s the first in a projected series of Rook family adventures.
Considerably more literary, but no less enjoyable, Oddity (Walker Books, £7.99) by Eli Brown is set in an alternative American West of the early 19th century. Napoleon’s troops are cutting swaths through the “Unified States”, helped along by his “endless army” — a single soldier, duplicated thousands of times. Magical items known as oddities are being taken by force for nefarious purposes by Tarantino-esque bandits: “They were the worst kind of men. None of them had been anywhere near kindness or bathwater for a very long time.”
Our heroine Clover is fascinated by the oddities, her dead mother having been a noted collector. When the poachers callously slaughter her father, the girl flees, accompanied by a heroic US army colonel who also happens to be a talking rooster.
There are many memorable encounters on the road, such as the villainous dandy Smalt, the quick-talking seller of fake medicine Nessa, and the Seamstress, a witch who stitches together monsters composed of dead animals and bits of junk. A careful note explains that the (white) author “chose to craft fictional groups rather than misrepresent the legitimate figures and history of Native groups by placing them in a magical, alternate history”.
Philip Womack’s Wildlord (Little Island, £7.99) opens in the reassuringly traditional setting of a boarding school, where orphaned Tom Swinton is spending the holidays under the benign eye of his housemaster. Rescue from this tedium comes in the form of a letter from a previously unknown relative inviting him to his home in Suffolk since Tom is the last of the Swintons. But the wording of the letter is odd, and immediately on arriving by horse-drawn carriage at Mundham Farm, Tom is shot at with a bow and arrow.
Two other teenagers, Zita and Kit, are also living at Mundham, their presence unexplained. The house seems to exist in several different dimensions, with doors and rooms appearing and disappearing; once inside, Tom finds it is not so easy to get out. Wildlord crackles with an otherworldly atmosphere reminiscent of the great Alan Garner. Tom, a kind and sensitive boy, also knows when a hug is more effective than the strongest magic.
Death stalks the pages of Poison For Breakfast (Oneworld, £10.99), the latest dark fable from Lemony Snicket, creator of the “Series of Unfortunate Events” books. One morning the unsuspecting Mister Snicket, as he likes to be known, tucks into his favourite repast of an egg with goats cheese, pears and tea with honey, only to discover a warning note: “You had poison for breakfast.”
He’s propelled on a journey — to the baker, the beekeeper and others — to understand why. A deceptively short narrative, this quickly moves away from its whimsical whodunnit premise to develop into a wittily macabre treatise about philosophy, creativity, connectivity, gratitude and bravely facing one’s demise while living as well as possible in the meantime. Spoiler: the answer involves libraries.
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Genre round-up — spooky young adult fiction
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