Some more fun picture books to check out from your local library this Halloween season (for the first part of this list click here).
Vampire Vacation by Laura Lavoie, illustrated by Micah Player
Fang is sick of his family taking the same vacation every year to Transylvania. If you’ve seen Dracula’s castle once you’ve seen it enough! And when he learns about an amazing place called “the beach” he is set on convincing his parents it’s time to try something new.
Fang tries, fails, and tries again to change his parents’ minds through a series of ill-planned schemes. After his plans fail, Fang speaks with honesty to his parents, who admit they were also being a bit short-sighted. And then the family decides this year, they will indeed try something new.
The characters are rendered nicely in expressive and active illustrations. The story moves a great pace to keep kids interested while the text never overwhelms the artwork. Sure, it’s really a summertime story, but Vampire Vacation can be enjoyed anytime of the year.
Frankenstein: A Monstrous Parody by Ludworst Bemonster (written by Rick Walton, illustrated by Nathan Hale)
Full disclosure: Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline is my absolute favorite book from childhood. That said, I was very wary of anyone making a parody of that classic, no matter how lovingly they produced it.
Frankenstein: A Monstrous Parody is a creepy, cute, and occasionally horrifying reimagining of Madeline, here featuring Frankenstein as the tiny troublemaking thorn in Miss Devel’s side. The artwork is page-by-page new versions of the classic images, now in Halloween color schemes, reenacting the beats of the original.
Replacing the twelve little girls in two straight lines are twelve ugly monsters in two crooked lines (the ugliest one was Frankenstein). At the zoo, it is the animals crying, “Boo-hoo!” And, instead of a burst appendix, our Frankenstein wakes in the middle of the night suffering from a missing head (presumably gobbled by another of the students). If you recall the ending of the original, you can guess the scene Miss Devel wakes to at the end of the book.
For the morbid and Halloween-obsessed kids in your life, this book is as much fun to read aloud as the original Madeline, but now featuring gross-out gags and horrific humor!
Scary Fright, Are You All Right? by Scott Gibala-Broxholm
Scary Fright, the young daughter of two proud monster parents, has been exhibiting some strange and un-spooky behaviors as of late. For one, she wants to keep a kitten as a pet instead of eating it for dinner. And then there are all the rainbows she’s painted around her room. In a final straw, the young monster has developed a taste for pizza. Pizza!
Her parents decide it’s time for an intervention. But the real lesson of Scary Fright, Are You All Right? is the one learned by her parents: love means accepting your children as they are, even if it means allowing kittens into your home and eating pizza. In fact, as the parents embrace the things their daughter loves, they too come to appreciate some of them as well (it is pizza, after all).
Structured as an early reader/easy reader, the book is broken down into simple chapters. The ratio of picture to text is well balanced for kids who are starting to read on their own. The story is not too frightening, and kids and parents alike will have a good laugh at many of the family’s antics.
Beware the Brindlebeast retold and illustrated by Anita Riggio
It’s Fall and the sun is setting earlier, the air is chilling, and mood is becoming spookier. Is there any better time of the year to delve into classic folklore than now?
Beware the Brindlebeast comes from a classic English folktale about an old woman living on a community’s fringes who comes face-to-face with a terrifying beast that has been scaring people in the nearby village. Old Birdie thinks it's her lucky day when she discovers a cauldron full of gold, but little does she suspect it is a trap laid by the dreaded Brindlebeast. But the Brindlebeast is in for a surprise when his trap doesn’t go the way he expected. For readers, that surprise will be a delightful one and, like any good piece of folklore, the story ends with a positive and important lesson about (spoiler alert) love and friendship.
Kids might find the illustrations of the Brindlebeast scary at first, but that’s the point. Appearances can be deceiving, and a few scary pictures are worth experiencing in order to reach the satisfying ending.
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