GHOSTS! (6+)
by Richard Brassey
Orion, £10.99, 48pp

AS NIGHTS GROW longer, the world of reason begins to droop and children’s thoughts turn to Hallowe’en. Many parents disapprove of this as an American import, but celebrating All Hallows Eve is an ancient tradition in Britain too, and I’m all in favour of carving pumpkins and dressing up to meet your neighbour.

For one thing, it’s the only time of year that I can pretend to be a supermodel (in my skeleton costume) and many children in a neighbourhood get to meet each other only when trick-or-treating.

It’s also a good time to look at spooky books. Valerie Thomas and Korky Paul’s Winnie the Witch series is an instant hit with almost any child of 4 and over. Those who have grown out of Meg and Mog, Room on the Broom and Pumpkin Soup but who are too young for Jill Murphy, Eva Ibbotson and J. K. Rowling will revel in the zany humour of the world’s least scary witch, despite living in a black castle with her black cat Wilbur.

Although she does her best, Winnie’s spells usually go wrong, with hysterically embarrassing results involving large knickers, bristly legs and a total lack of self-consciousness. Now in her seventh outing, and with a bumper collection of the first six just published by OUP, Winnie deserves celebration.

These picture books deserve a place on any child’s shelf. Paul is simply a brilliant illustrator, his drawings full of detail that young children enjoy exploring, with small dragons, snakes and spiders doing cheeky things in the background, and a gorgeous line of violently spotted underwear strung between the turrets of Winnie’s castle. Winnie’s insanely ornate furniture would make Heath Robinson weep with envy.

Not surprisingly, she often comes into conflict with modern life, from traffic jams at the seaside to computers. There is always a solution to her problems, although it is never obvious — she keeps crashing into things in the sky not just because it’s become more crowded but because she needs to wear spectacles; she discovers that conjuring up a swimming pool of her own is better than struggling on to the beach; that winter is better than a magically unseasonal summer, and so on.

In Winnie’s Midnight Dragon, a small dragon gets through the cat flap and is chased round the house by Wilbur. Thomas’s story is as deliciously fresh and funny as ever, the perfect foil to the drawings. Suits of armour crash down, and even turning the dragon’s hazardous flames into a cloud of butterflies fails to sort out the mess.

The irresistibly lugubrious wit prepares children for the Addams Family, James Thurber, Edward Gorey, Ronald Searle and the vein of mock Gothic that Anglo-American humour delights in.

Ghosts! The Ultimate Guide for Ghost Hunters has a ghoulish holograph of a screaming boy which turns into a skull on the cover. Inside are tales about how to keep ghosts away, spooky sounds, famous hauntings and more unusual ones (such as the motorcyclist ghost of the Blackwall Tunnel in East London and an entire legion of Roman ghosts in York), all illustrated in the cheery style that made Richard Brassey’s Brilliant Brits series such a hit among primary school historians.

Some seriously scary stuff is now published for kids, from Joseph Delaney’s wonderful Wardstone Chronicles to the ghastly Goosebumps series, but Ghosts! is far more reassuring than it may seem. Almost all children aged over 6 enjoy frights in the night if they are safely between covers. So no trick to finding a treat this Hallowe’en, then.

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