High autumn is the season of scary stories. Rusting leaves and greyish-white tendrils of mist impel me to take down half-remembered, wholly feared volumes from the safety of the highest shelves. Evil magic, unquiet spirits, banal objects with unsuspected teeth: all come out in good time for Halloween, and remain in the ascendant until Christmas Eve. Especially children's books. Frightening stories read as a child affect the reader at bone-marrow level, helping to shape the fears and vague uneasinesses you'll carry all your life, long after you've forgotten their sources. Encountering the originals again, in sober adulthood and a well-lit room, may draw the monster's teeth – or confirm that your childhood self was right to be so frightened.
One of my favourite ghost story collections is A Foot in the Grave, featuring eight stories written by Joan Aiken to fit a series of Jan Pienkowski's stark, neon-backed silhouettes, rather than the more conventional way round. This collaboration produced a book that still gives me the chills every time I read or remember it – the horrible aunt who returns as a creeping, strangling vine in Bindweed, and the history teacher whose grave-robbing on a trip abroad is punished by an encounter with local horror "la larva" are both memorably nasty. The gem of the collection, though, is Amberland – an eerily beautiful imagined haven, which the narrator's bullied little brother goes to fatal lengths to reach. Like all the best ghost stories, it's layered with as much sorrow and regret as straightforward fear.
Another well-thumbed favourite frightener is Theresa Breslin's Whispers in the Graveyard, which deservedly won the 1994 Carnegie for its slow-building menace. It centres on a forgotten smallpox graveyard and a chest inscribed with the hissable word "Malefice". The dyslexic young protagonist, Solomon, is driven by a teacher's cruelty to seek solitary refuge in the kirkyard, but a forgotten evil awaits him there, battening on his furious emotions. Similarly, Robert Westall's The Scarecrows is right up there with MR James – three amorphous straw figures, animated by the cold anger of a disturbed teenager, move inexorably to repeat their murderous past, drawing him along with them. Anything by Leon Garfield is also ideal reading matter for the cold hinge of the year. I am shortly going to settle down to the hideously compelling The Empty Sleeve, all sickly twins, fish-scented spectres and portents of rottenness, with a glass of green ginger wine and a million-candlepower torch in case of emergency.
None of these classics, though, have cost me as many palm-sweating moments, convinced that hanging clothes are demons waiting insouciantly on my wardrobe door, as Lindsey Barraclough's 2011 debut, Long Lankin. Constructed around a haunting ballad (bedwettingly scary in itself: "Said my lord to my lady as he mounted his horse, / "Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss"), Barraclough's book breaks all the writing-for-kids rules by foregrounding an adult as one of several narrative voices. But Aunt Ida's angry, terrified presence, more responsible and more awfully knowledgeable than the child protagonists, only emphasises the realness of the thin, ubiquitous predator in the book's background, waiting to creep in at any "unpinned window" and carry away another tiny child.
More lightheartedly – but still full of pumpkin-headed, black-mouthed ghosts, and the red-eyed, unseen horror Bo Cleevil – Jodi Lynn Anderson's May Bird and the Ever After is an assured and satisfying read, a hybrid of Stephen King's Bag of Bones and Beetlejuice for younger readers. And older kids – strong-stomached enough for woodcuts of blinded unfortunates proffering their own trickling eyeballs – may relish Welsh storyteller Daniel Morden's aptly named Dark Tales from the Woods, retelling the grim and uncompromising tales of Abram Wood, the King of the Gypsies.
Any other Halloween recommendations of contemporary grisly, spectral and unforgettable writing for kids? Or remembered children's stories that frightened you into sleeping with the lights on?
