Halloween books for kids to sink their teeth into

Young people have disappeared, too, from the village where young Fran is sent to stay with her aunt and uncle in The Strange Disappearance of Imogen Good (Nosy Crow, £7.99). Once they’ve gone, no one remembers them at all. But Fran does recall her annoying, unkind cousin Imogen, and enlists Imogen’s flummoxed, erstwhile best friend to explore what is really lurking behind the garden walls of nearby Stillness Hall (cue: more uncanny statues). Kirsty Applebaum weaves together an enchanted legend from the manor’s distant past with the very contemporary complexities of female friendship.

Another pesky, cursed pile is at the centre of Skulkmoor (Puffin, £14.99), Hana Tooke’s tale of a house divided over two long-ago deaths. A wall literally runs down the middle of this grand home, separating warring cousins Iris and Ted, whose families must compete to inherit the estate. All is, of course, not as it seems, as the two cousins try to outwit each other, marshalling crows, discovering secret passages and, eventually, unravelling more than one malfeasance from the clan’s past. Iris’s disability is treated matter-of-factly as a workaday factor in this complex murder mystery. And Ayesha L Rubio’s great drawings locate the kawaii in period costumes.

Even more inventive is Emma Carroll’s Dracula & Daughters (Faber, £7.99), a gleeful gothic tale in which the sudden death of a music hall actress precipitates an epidemic of vampirism. The plot, though, revolves around three unlikely, flame-haired allies who rapidly discover they are cousins – with distant Transylvanian relatives, no less – and that vampirism is treatable; a discredited female doctor has the cure. Moreover, the trio glean that the powerful men of their town stand to benefit financially from people’s fear. Illustrator Marta Bertello renders Mina (named after Bram Stoker’s Mina Harker, the schoolmistress bitten by Dracula), Buffy (yep, that’s a 90s nod) and Bella (hello, Twilight) as vividly as Carroll.

In the side-realm of fantasy, one of our finest authors, Katherine Rundell, deserves a mention for The Poisoned King (Bloomsbury, £14.99), book two in her smash hit Impossible Creatures series. A princess’s father is framed for the murder of his own father; now she is at risk and must fight to clear his name. Spoiler alert: we absolutely need more books in which heirs to the throne replace their birthright with representative democracy.

It’s back to the real, very present day with Role Model (Knights of Media, £7.99) by the indefatigably good Elle McNicoll. This is another short, pacy novel, in which neurodivergent Aeriel Sharpe’s workaholic mother becomes prime minister, turning Aeriel’s already complicated life upside down. McNicoll is excellent on the scourge of mean girls and the unintended consequences of going viral. The author’s wider point is that no one – especially not an autistic girl like Aeriel – should be forced to become a poster-person for cheery resilience.

Finally, a real horror story. After Halloween comes Armistice Day. The award-winning Jamila Gavin has written My Soul, A Shining Tree (Farshore, £8.99), a short book set during the first world war. The hopes, fears and privations of three characters are explored: Belgian country girl Lotte; glory-hunting German enlistee Ernst, whose courage fails him; and Khudadad Khan, an Indian gunner far from home, who is based on a historical figure. The three – all technically enemies, all in their own way victims – end up sheltering from the carnage under the same tree one night. The title quotes Siegfried Sassoon’s poem Tree and Sky: “Let my soul, a shining tree, / Silver branches lift towards thee, / Where on a hallowed winter’s night / The clear-eyed angels may alight.”

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Illustration by Ayesha L Rubio taken from Skulkmoor