#451 of 1001 · October 25, 2021

Once again October has cast its delightfully dark shadow upon the landscape of my imagination. As I did last year, I’ll be counting down the seven days leading up to Halloween with a sequence of scary picture books. This first one, Eve Bunting and Susan Meddaugh’s In the Haunted House, begins with an austere Victorian home surrounded by a grove of barren trees. Bunting’s energetic rhyming couplets beckon us inside to meet a delightful cadre of fearsome creatures: ghosts, witches, bats, a mummy, a skeleton, a vampire, a werewolf, Frankenstein’s monster, and other ghouls and creepy-crawlies. Meddaugh’s spooky pencil-and-watercolor art depicts only the feet of the two humans taking their tour of the eerie house. In brief interludes throughout, the adult comforts the child and offers to leave early. In a wordless sequence at the conclusion, however, it emerges that the parent was the one frightened all along—while the child is ready to go back for more. #haunted #house #hauntedhouse #ghost #witch #bat #mummy #skeleton #vampire #werewolf #monster #halloween #book #books #childrensbooks #picturebook #childrensbookillustration #childrensliterature #illustration #kidlit #kidsbooks #bookworm #booklover #booklovers #bibliophile #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #bookstagrammers #instabook #instabooks