Hallowe’en has become our favourite autumn celebration. Harry Potter and the attraction of dressing up and touring around neighbours’ houses to demand sweets with menaces may have something to do with it, but, whatever the reason,£235 million will be spent on Hallowe’en in Britain this year, according to the research company Planet Retail.

Publishing has risen to the event by increasing its output of books about ghosts, witches, vampires and things that go bump in the night to entertain us over autumn half term. Nick Sharratt, best known for his Jacqueline Wilson illustrations, has What’s in the Witch’s Kitchen (Walker, £9.99, Buy this book), with the clever idea of flaps that open to give different answers.

One flap reveals ordinary things such as cheese, popcorn, a cherry tart — but opened the other way shows bats with fleas, slimy frogspawn and lizard’s fart. The pictures are bright and bold, but the lack of consistency in how the flaps open will frustrate toddlers, so will suit 3+ only. Liz Martinez and Mark Beech’s picture book The Everyday Witch takes Roald Dahl’s idea that witches are among us, and suggests in rhyming couplets that this might apply to your mum. All good fun, with illustrations reminiscent of Quentin Blake and Korky Paul (Bloomsbury, 5.99 £5.69). If pop-ups are your thing, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Walker, £14.99, Buy this book) is made for it. Vampires, giant dogs and bats spring out as David Hawcock’s fabulous paper engineering meets Anthony Williams’ sharp graphic style. But at this price it may just be for budding art students of 11+.

Horrid Henry Wakes the Dead (Orion, £4.99, Buy this book), Francesca Simon’s latest excursion of four short stories, has the awful child dressed up as if for Hallowe’en but in fact performing a conjuring trick on his brother, Perfect Peter, in a talent show. Although my favourite story is the first, describing the tussle for the TV remote control, these remain ideal early readers for 6+. Debi Gliori’s Witch Baby and Me (Corgi Childrens, £4.99, Buy this book) series has a third in the series about an elder sister with a dim view of a sibling. Convinced that her younger sister, Daisy, is a witch baby, complete with an invisible dog, Lily has problems on Hallowe’en when the dog goes missing. It’s charming, quirky stuff just right for 7+.

Younger ones will adore Morris the Mankiest Monster by Giles Andreae and Sarah McIntyre (David Fickling, £10.99, Buy this book). Who could resist a giant yellow monster picking slime out of its nose? Turned down by 15 publishers, this is like Raymond Briggs’s Fungus the Bogeyman but with a cheerier outlook.

Joseph Delaney’s Spooks series is the real thing, however, and the more Delaney adds detail and depth to Tom Ward’s battles against the witch clans of the county, the more fascinating they become. In Witches (The Bodley Head, £7.99, Buy this book), the first-person Wardstone novels switch into a series of short stories told by characters ranging from Tom’s master, the spook John Gregory, to the witch assassin Grimalkin. Delaney’s mastery of drama and suspense makes these more than horror. These are tales about courage and loyalty, disobedience and moral choice, told in pared-down prose that is instantly evocative and highly filmic. The endings always satisfy, even when they are tragic, and these stories will grip any child between 9 and 13 like a witch’s talons.

Few novels about the dead have entranced me as much as Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book, recent winner of the Newbery Medal in the US, and now out in paperback (Bloomsbury, £6.99, Buy this book). Gaiman has gone from being a cult graphic novelist to a scriptwriter and is probably the biggest talent in fantasy. If his Coraline was too weird for your kids, try this, which appeals to anyone with a heart and brain of 11+. Although it has the most frightening opening imaginable — a child escapes the murderer of his entire family by toddling into the local graveyard — it is also one of the most touching, funny and reassuring. For little Nobody is adopted by the Graveyard’s ghosts and his elegant, melancholy tutor is a vampire who is kinder and wiser than those in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

Darran Shan has legions of fans among the 12+ range, and the release this weekend of the film of his Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant will only add to them. “Shansters” have long since moved on from vampires to demons in the Demonata series, however, and the last of the ten-book series, Hell’s Heroes (HarperCollins, £12.99, Buy this book), has the teen werewolf Grubbs Grady coming through hell with his dying uncle Dervish to save the Universe. If you enjoy Shan’s ghoulishness this will be meat and drink to you, but I can’t help wishing that he would return to the more slow-paced psychology of his earlier books. Hell’s Heroes is as relentlessly clever and shocking as a computer game, full of ideas concerning chess, the choice between “vileness and humanity” and how the worst torturers are those capable of pity and love.

The point is, though, that you also need to care about characters. Gaiman makes us care not just about his hero, Nobody, but also the kindly ghosts and lonely witches who guard him; Shan doesn’t. Children go through a stage of devouring the machine-tooled horrors of the Goosebump series before moving to the wit of Anthony Horowitz’s horror stories, and something more is needed to move to the next level. So my final choice is Shapeshifters, the late Adrian Mitchell’s retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, illustrated by Alan Lee (Frances Lincoln, £14.99, Buy this book). Greek myths are a perfect way to celebrate the changing year, with its dance of death, mutability and rebirth. Here, in lyric prose and detailed pictures, is the first Wolfman, Lycaon, monsters such as Proteus, the loss of Orpheus’s Eurydice and the return of Narcissus from the Underworld. Why are they so affecting, more than 2,000 years later? They may not inspire Hallowe’en costumes but there’s enough about humanity’s dreams and fears in Shapeshifters to last a child for life.

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