Oh, No, Green Glow! Creepy Pair of Underwear by Aaron Reynolds

Jasper Rabbit needed new underwear.

There's no alternative for undies, so Mom and Jasper are off to the Underwear Store. Mom grabs the last three packs of Plain White, thinking this trip is going to blissfully, er, brief.

But then Jasper sees them.

CREEPY UNDERWEAR.

So creepy! They were glorious!

In Day-Glo Green, with a Frankenstein face glowering on the front, they are perfect! Mom thinks they're too creepy for her bunny, but Jasper insists.

I'm not a little bunny any more! I'm a big rabbit!

Jasper can't wait to wear the creepy skivvies. He wears them to bed. But despite repetition of his "big bunny" mantra, the green and ghoulish glow of his lower half creeps Jasper out. Even piling a pillow over his face can't keep the creepy green glow out of his eyes.

Jasper skins out of the spooky pants and stuffs them into the bottom of the laundry hamper, but the glow in his room remains just as greenish and ghoulish as before. Finally Jasper falls into a fretful sleep, but when he wakes up, he finds that he is wearing the creepy briefs again. Is there a curse on his keister?

Jasper tries everything to rid himself of the dreadful drawers. He cuts them up into glowing green bits. But no matter where he stashes them, they return, back on his tushie, still ghoulishly green and glowing. He even mails them to China, only to receive them back in record time, with souvenirs--a pair of chopsticks and a toy panda! Finally Jasper slogs out at midnight with a shovel to bury the creepy underwear deep in a hole on the top of the distant Crookhanger Hill.

At last he drags himself into bed, switches off his bedside light, and lies down in the dark room with a satisfied smile. It's total darkness at last! Only....

It was REALLY DARK in there!

Jasper finds that even for a big rabbit, there can be too much of a good thing, and now there's way too much darkness in his bedroom. Will the Creepy Underwear have a return booking on his bottom?

There's a tiny bit of horror and and a lot of humor in Aaron Reynolds' Creepy Pair of Underwear! (Simon and Schuster, 2017), and a plenty of underpants-spurred hilarity is sure to ensue when young readers hear or read this spookypants tale.

Artist Peter Brown, who earned a Caldecott Honor Award for his collaboration with Aaron Reynolds in Creepy Carrots! (see review here), outdoes himself in this one. His uniformly grayscale illustrations, lighted only by the green glow of the seemingly possessed underpants, sets the stage well, alternating full-page illustrations with panels that build suspense. His Underwear Store is everything it should be--row after row of square tables with neat stacks of briefs, and when Jasper finally settles down to sleep and turns off his light, the next page turn reveals a double-page spread of nothing but... flat black. Brown also adds plenty of sight gags, changing the monster face on the briefs slightly, even down to the one back from China, matching the changing looks on poor Jasper's face. This new undie tale from Reynolds and Brown is doubtless destined to be the top hit of this year's spooky season.