Well it’s October, the spookiest month of the year and a great time for some spooky tales and children’s Halloween stories are invitations to play with fear in a safe, controlled way. They teach readers how to handle unsettling ideas by wrapping them in humour, rhythm and familiar settings while keeping scares light enough to excite rather than traumatise. Good Halloween tales for younger readers balance the eerie with the reassuring, offering mischievous monsters, silly mishaps and clear moral lines so that the tension resolves into laughter or relief. Short, illustrated stories and comics work especially well at this time of year because the images puncture suspense with expressive faces and slapstick, and short chapters let nervous readers pause when they need to before plunging back in. Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories by Jeff Kinney is perfectly calibrated for children who want a spooky night without real terror.
Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories by Jeff Kinney is a collection of short, comic-illustrated tales. And for those of you that think the name sounds familiar, Rowley is the best friend of Greg Heffley, the WIMPY KID! This book features 14 fun stories featuring werewolves, vampires, ghosts and even a lonely human head!
The stories are:
- The Changing – a hairy werewolf tale
- The Prankster – the ultimate prank goes deadly wrong
- Ghost Friend – ghostly friends can be annoying
- The Biter – a vampire tale… or is it?
- The Human Head – even without a body love can be found
- The Scanner – is everybody being the same a good idea?
- The Cellar – looks at the danger of too much screen time
- The Nap – Granny sleeps the sleep of the dead
- The Stain – lies can cause spots
- A Mummy – the war of the Mummies
- The Science Project – Victor makes a new friend
- The Medicine Cabinet – never open the medicine cabinet!
- The Invasion – not everybody is friendly, even when accepted
- The Demon – never utter the words of strange rituals
Overall, Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories is a fun collection of Halloween tales for children, with some clever twists and comedic outcomes rather than sustained dread. The tales are short and fun, with a twinge of humorous Halloween kid-friendly terror. The text, in a diary-style format, is easy and clear to read, littered throughout with simple fun and but expressive drawings. The tone of the storytelling treats fear as something to be laughed at, not something to scare you from turning the pages.
Each short story presents a familiar monster young readers will associate with Halloween – zombies, ghosts, mummies, disembodied heads, but the real fun lies in Kinney’s ability to remove the menace and create characters that often reveal human quirks, making the tales more laughter than scares. Young page turners will loving reading tales about an airport machine that turns everyone into skeletons and making a new friend that just won’t go away.
I thought that Rowley Jefferson’s Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories is an excellent Halloween pick for young readers, age 8+, who want comic thrills rather than scary Halloween tales. The stories are fun and varied, the illustrations help to increase the laughter with their visual representations of the events (while breaking up the text into more manageable chunks) and the Halloween themed edge of the pages is excellent.
While it may feature a variety of monsters, ghosts, vampires and even aliens, the book is more fun and laughter rather than spine-tingling scares.
Rating: 4/5
RRP: £12.99 (Hardback) / £7.99 (Paperback) / £3.99 (Kindle)
For more information, visit www.wimpykidclub.co.uk. Available to buy from Amazon here.
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