Don't Look Back! On a Windy Night by Nancy Raines Day

ON A WINDY NIGHT ON A WINDING ROAD
A BOY WALKS HOME WITH A HEAVY LOAD.

WHAT'S THAT? HIS HEART FLIP-FLOPS WITH FEAR.
A WHISPER RUSTLES IN HIS EAR.

CLICKETY-CLACK. BONES IN A SACK.
THEY COULD BE YOURS IF YOU LOOK BACK.

It's a setup for a really creepy tale. A boy walks home carrying a heavy sack, the clouds scuttle over the moon, and it's almost too dark to see. But as he walks down a hill and into a dark wood, he just knows he's hearing a whisper in his ear:

CLICKETY-CLACK. BONES IN A SACK.
THEY COULD BE YOURS. DON'T LOOK BACK!

WHO? DO YOU MEAN ME?
WHO ELSE? OWL HOOTS BACK FROM HIS TREE.

In the woods rough ghostly fingers seem to brush his face, and as he emerges into the windswept field, skeletons dance with much clicking and clacking. Fast and faster the boy goes, but when he stumbles and falls to the ground his fingers graze a motionless head that feels like it's dead!

Then he's almost home, running into his own backyard where a dark shadow seems to grab at his legs. Will he be caught here, almost at his own back door?

THE HAIRY BEAST SITS ON HIS SHOE.
AND IT MAKES A MEEK--ME-EW.

SO THE BOY SCOOPS UP HIS CAT.
THEY BOTH GO HOME--AND THAT IS THAT.

In Nancy Raines Day's just-in-time for Halloween On a Windy Night (Abrams, October, 2010), her rhyming text sets the reader or listener up for a truly scary dash through the dark, with something so scary just behind that we dare not look! Ghosts, skeletons, scary heads, hairy beasts, all those figments of the dark imagination are there. And at first glance, the illustrations set the scene for the same story.

But in a closer look, almost concealed by the dark, we see what's behind all these scary sounds. Dry leaves and bare branches brush the boy's face and legs; dry corn stalks crickle and crackle in the wind, ripe pumpkins scatter across the field, and a little black cat jumps out to greet his boy with a pounce--and finally, as a mouse spills the boy's trick-or-treat candy bag onto the floor with a clickety-clack, we know what that rattle and clack that seemed to follow the boy all the way home really was. It's all in great fun, and the scary walk home after Halloween trick-or-treating becomes a funny case of overblown imagination. Whew! What a trip!

For Halloween fun, pair this one with Linda Williams' wonderful classic, The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything, for a duo of just-scary-enough Halloween stories for the young.

Ghost Limbo: The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to ALL the Ghosts, Found out Where they WENT, and Went There by Daniel Pinkwater

You know you're not in for the average middle school saga when the heroine introduces herself as Yggdrasil Birnbaum and tells us that the residential hotel where she lives is inhabited by ghosts--lots of them, including the spirit of Rudolph Valentino, La Brea Tar Pit Woman, Billy the Phantom Bellhop (a fifteen-year-old ghost who has recently acquired his driver's license as a 59-year-old semi-visible motorist), and a ghostly bunny named Chase.

But Iggy's problem is NOT the fact that there are innumerable intriguing and sometimes annoying ghosts living in her building, but the fact that the ghosts seem to be disappearing, or dispersing, or disembodying or whatever. Her favorites seem somehow to be leaving their pleasant afterlife in the Hollywood of 1950, apparently to congregate at an undisclosed location in another plane of existence.

It's all too much for the free-spirited Iggy to take, and with her adventurous friends Neddie Wentworthstein (of the previous book The Neddiad: How Neddie Took the Train, Went to Hollywood, and Saved Civilization) and Seamus Finn, she learns from a bit of sleuthing around Old Hollywood's famous eateries that the ghosts have decamped for an other worldly holiday assembly in Old New Hackensack in the great beyond, and soon the three friends throw themselves solidly down their own rabbit hole as they follow Chase into Underland to find out what's up with their friendly dead.

Along the way they meet up with author Daniel Pinkwater's usual suspects, beginning with Mama Banana and her commune of elderly midget hoopies who wear rainbow garb and beads and ply the three with granola, acoustic music, and a place to crash.

"Dude," one of the old people said. "It's kids in a coracle!"

"Far out!" another old person said.

"Heavy!" said another one.

We beached our coracle and helped the old people carry baskets of fish up the bank.

"What do you do with the fish?" I asked.

"We smoke them."

"Oh, and then you sell them?"

"Huh?"

The three travelers go on to meet up with a witch in a suspiciously gingerbready house who seeks to change children into cats, escaping her with no more than reasonably attractive little whiskers added to their faces. They then go on to meet up with, among others, the alternate universe versions of Toad of Toad Hall, The Wiz of Oz, and the Good Witch Shmenda, who floats down in a bubble and with their help gives the evil witches of New Old Hackensack their comeuppance. In Daniel Pinkwater's The Yggyssey: How Iggy Wondered What Happened to All the Ghosts, Found Out Where They Went, and Went There, it's just another day in the life for his wonderfully wacky characters.

As School Library Journal's reviewer puts it, "Pinkwater's trademark tongue-in-cheek humor is very much in evidence, as is his penchant for odd names and eccentric folks. His version of 1950s L.A., filled with aging movie stars and health-food fanatics, is authentically and delightfully kooky. The story takes a while to get going, but once these young heroes reach Underland, the action picks up, and readers will speed happily through to the goofy ending."

It Takes a Graveyard: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

Ever since the child had learned to walk, he had been his mother's and father's despair and delight, for there never was such a boy for wandering, for climbing up things, for getting into and out of things. That night he had been woken by the sound of something on the floor beneath him falling with a crash. Awake, he soon became bored, and had begun looking for a way out of his crib....

He landed with a muffled thump on a small mound of furry, fuzzy toys. He was surprised when he hit the floor, but he did not cry out; if you cried out, they came and put you back in your crib.

He crawled out of the room. Stairs that went down, he had discovered, were fairly simple. He did them sitting down, bumping from step to step on his well-padded bottom.... When he reached the last step, when he reached the little hall and stood up, the diaper fell off. He stepped out of it. He was only wearing a child's nightshirt. The stairs that led back up to his room and his family were steep, but the door to the street was open and inviting....

The child stepped out of the house a little hesitantly. The fog wreathed around him like a long-lost friend. And then, uncertainly at first, then with increasing speed and confidence, the boy tottered up the hill.

By now most people interested in the 2009 Newbery Award book, The Graveyard Book, have heard Neil Gaiman's explanation of how, with Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book on his mind, he took his two-year-old son to a nearby cemetery to let him ride his tricycle away from any danger of traffic, and in one of those creative connections which writers make, began to imagine a parallel story about a toddler whose family is killed by a midnight murderer and who unknowingly wanders away and into the kindly care of the ghosts within a neighboring graveyard.

There's no bouncy Disney soundtrack to this parallel, no singing and dancing phantasms, but the kindly Owens take the two-year-old into their mausoleum and make sure that he has a name (Nobody Owens) and everything he needs to grow up as a live boy in a community of benevolent ghosts. There is a mysterious Celtic tomb guarded mindlessly by the slithery Sleer, a Roman soldier who is the oldest human ghost residing there, ghosts of long-dead children who become his playmates, and a sixteenth-century witch who rescues him from mortal danger only when the, um, spirit moves her. Like Mowgli, Bod has a "retired" teacher who educates him in reading and history and other human learning, and he has a mentor, Silas, a being existing between life and death, who instructs him in the ways of the everyday world--and of that other world from which his family's enemies spring--and who ultimately helps him leave his hallowed refuge behind for the wider world of the living.

Bod grows up with the Freedom of the Graveyard, learning the secret ways of shades--fading, dreamwalking, haunting, and seeing in the dark--but knowing all the time that that man--one of the group of assassins all known as Jack--waits for him just outside the sanctuary of the graveyard gate.

But when Bod is five years old, he makes a friend among the living, a girl named Scarlet whose parents bring her to the graveyard to play inside the nature preserve which the old burial ground has become. Bod's connection with Scarlett inevitably draws him into the outside world and inevitably into both danger and the chance to make a life, a fully human life, in it.

Silas said, "Out there, the man who killed your family is, I believe, still looking for you, still intends to kill you."

Bod shrugged. "So?" he asked. "It's only death. I mean, all of my best friends are dead."

"Yes," Silas hesitated. "They are. And they are, for the most part, done with the world. You are not. You're alive, Bod. That means you have infinite potential. You can do anything, make anything, dream anything. If you change the world, the world will change. Potential. Once you're dead, it's gone. Over. You may be buried here, you may even walk. But that potential is finished."

Despite its unique setting, The Graveyard Book is far from grim or terrifying, peopled as it is with a memorable community of spirits with all the marvelous vagaries of living people. The story is filled with humor and adventure, moral hazard and courageous, self-sacrificing deeds--everything an absorbing coming-of-age tale should have. As in A Wrinkle in Time, the The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Harry Potter series, among other well-known fantasies for young people, Gaiman plucks his young hero out of the everyday world and puts him in the company of fantastic characters and into the thick of the good vs. evil struggle between the seen and the unseen world.

The Phantom Isles by Stephen Alter

When three middle school friend, Ming, Orion, and Courtney slip into the Carville, Massachusetts, Public Library one night through an open window, their mission is to investigate an intriguing book, The Compleat Necromancer, which Ming had located earlier, one which foretold that three friends would use its incantation to reveal spirits. In the basement stacks of the darkened library the three read the spell by the waning light of their nearly spent flashlight. When nothing seems to happen, the three hurriedly return the book to the shelf, and grumbling that they never believed in ghosts anyway, they make their escape.

But when librarian Alma Parker finds the book upside down on the shelf the next morning and opens it, she can't believe what she sees:

She was about to close the book and return it to its proper place on the place when something made her cry out. Alma had never screamed in her life, and certainly not in the library, but this was the loudest, most frightened sound she had ever made.

Between the pages of the book, she saw the profile of a boy's face. The words were still there, printed on the pages, but hovering just above them, like a filmy, translucent layer, was an unmistakable image, as if traced in the air.... Unlike a photograph, the image moved and he face turned to look at her. His eyes were a distant gray color, like smoke, and Alma felt certain he could see her too.

Still intrigued by the mysterious book, one of many donated by Hezikiah Osgood, now deceased and survived only by his elderly son Nick, the children make the distant Indian Ocean islands, the Ihlas dos Fastasmas, where the book was written, their assigned social studies project. As they do their research in the library, they too discover ghostly images seemingly trapped inside other books left by Osgood.

When Alma Parker finds the children gathering the donated books, she realizes that they, too, have seen the mysterious images of the trapped spirits and together they set out to learn the secrets which will release the phantom spirits to return to their island home. Research into the convoluted writings of Hezikiah Osgood and a visit to his elderly son, who now speaks only in a strange, backward version of English, begins to shed some light on the mystery, and together with their open-minded town librarian Ming, Orion, and Courtney unravel Osgood's secrets and determine how to use modern technology to reverse the force which binds the spirits inside the dusty old tomes.

A very different ghost tale, more atmospheric than spooky, which allows the personal stories of its very real ghostly spirits to emerge, this is a complex little novel which middle readers will find intriguing and hard to put down. Fans of the three cerebral investigators in Blue Balliett's Chasing Vermeer, Wright 3, and the just published Calder Game or John Bellairs' fantasy mysteries such as The House With a Clock In Its Walls (Lewis Barnavelt), will find Stephen Alter's The Phantom Isles very much to their taste.

Lincoln Walks by Night: The Ghost, The White House, and Me by Judith St. George

Judith St. George, author of the Caldecott Award book So You Want to be President? Revised and Updated Edition puts her knowledge of presidents and the White House to work in this gentle First Family ghost story.

Katharine (a.k.a. KayKay) and younger sister Annie Granger have just moved into the White House. As the daughters of America's first woman president, the sisters find living in the executive mansion a bit off-putting. Their mom is always busy with matters of state, and it's hard to get used to being shadowed by the Secret Service at school and at home. But when their school acquaintance, Borden Williamson, grandson of the previous president, comes along with his grandparents for a formal lunch, he gets KayKay's attention with his story of seeing Abe Lincoln's ghost while he was sleeping over in the Lincoln bedroom.

Kay, a would-be mystery writer, sees the literary possibilities of spending the night there herself, but her mom is too absorbed in a crisis in Chile to set up the event. But when her fun-loving Uncle Matt comes for a visit and is offered the famous bedroom for the night, Kay and Annie can't resist the opportunity to prank their good-natured uncle. Rigging up her iPod to start playing the Gettysburg Address at 2:00 a.m. from a wardrobe inside the Lincoln Bedroom, Kay slips down the hall to knock on the door, the warning Lincoln's ghost is said always to use before his appearances in the room. To her embarrassment, the victim of the prank turns out to be a visiting diplomat from Chile who had put in a special request for the room for his one-night stay at the White House. While their dad and uncle are amused by their inventive practical joke, Madame President Granger is not, and the girls are grounded for two weeks.

The time passes slowly for the two prisoners inside the White House, but at the end of the penalty, their mom relents and agrees to let the two sleep in the reputedly haunted chamber. Even KayKay is a bit intimidated by the dark, massive, old-fashioned furnishings and the room's reputation, but she is comforted by the presence of a talkative Secret Service agent, Robert Todd, stationed outside the door, who reassures her that Lincoln was a loving father who sometimes joined in his own two boys' pranks. When they finally manage to fall asleep, the two are awakened by several firm knocks at the door and the appearance of a tall, thin figure in a dark shawl and high hat who enters with a ghostly beckoning of his spectral hand. Just as Kay feels she is going to faint from shock, the figure gives a familiar wave and backs through the door and into the shadowy hall.

That wave clicks in Kay's mind, and in a shot she's down the hall following the dark figure. "Stop, Abraham Lincoln, stop!" she calls out. Kay is not at all surprised to see that the ghost is her mom, Madame President, in a Lincoln costume, wig, and beard, trying to control her giggles at her daughters' reaction to her joke.

As the First Family shares a very early morning breakfast in the family kitchen, they go over the whole story. There's just one problem. Her mom assures her that she did not assign an agent to guard the door to the Lincoln bedroom, and her dad points out that there is no Secret Service man on staff named Robert Todd.

"Mmm . . . Robert Todd." Dad runs his hand over his bald spot, and then his face lights up. "No wonder the name sounds familiar. Robert Todd Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln's oldest son...." His voice trails off.

KayKay realizes that she has unmasked one fake ghost only to uncover a second Lincoln ghost in the White House.

Judith St. George has a good time with the White House setting, even suggesting that KayKay is reading her book So You Want to Be President? as she researches the presidents who died in office. The Ghost, The White House, And Me gives readers a chance to experience a touch of mystery while finding out what it would be like to live in the White House with their mom as the President of the United States.

Good and Scary! Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Madness illustrated by Gus Grimly

Gus Grimly's sly and engagingly grotesque drawings provide the perfect introduction to younger readers to the famously macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe.

Four of Poe's good and scary short stories--"The Black Cat," "The Masque of the Red Death," "Hop-Frog," and "Fall of the House of Usher"--are marginally abridged without significantly altering Poe's original descriptive language. Meanwhile, Gus Grimly's spot art and full-page illustrations are evocative in the mood, if not style, of Charles Addams and elaborate the text to make it accessible to elementary and middle school readers.

For good, spooky fun at Halloween and on any dark and stormy night, Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Madness is a small book which carries a lot of punch!