From My Reading Chair…
“Keep out.” “Turn back now.” “Do not enter.” “Strictly private.”
You’re making it VERY difficult to mind my own business!
Even the textured front cover of *The Most Haunted House* gets my senses ready to uncover what’s within. You can’t invite my fingertips in and tell the rest of me to KEEP OUT.
Mixed messages, Nicola Baxter and June Goulding. Mixed messages!
Luckily for my sneaky little fingertips and nosey nose, curiosity pays off. Baxter and Goulding have made something wonderfully unusual here. It’s almost like paper theatre: diorama pop-ups with layers of creepy landscape to peer through, layering the intrigue and suspense.
I love this vintage artistic technique. In a world of screens and scrolling, there’s something delicious about physically crafted art that rewards slow looking. My eyeballs have layers, crevices and nooks to investigate at my leisure!
The words send me on an eerie adventure, and the illustration layers give me more fear to play with. I’m being guided deeper into somewhere forbidden that I’ve repeatedly been told I shouldn’t be. I adore this playful defiance: a chance for our little monsters to try being brave between the pages. (I can almost hear the little frightened giggles haunting the book if I’m quiet enough!)
The story itself is actually very meaty, too, with a lot of its bones on display through the illustrations. The full-page text sits on the left, handwritten on scrolls, while the layered scenes fill the right. Yum! Something for my teeth as well as my eyeballs!
It’s got horror and humour in abundance. The dread builds as we go deeper and deeper into the forbidden house, all the way to that terrifying wardrobe… until that final twist dissolves it all.
I’m keeping that twist strictly private. You’ll have to be brave, ignore the warnings and explore at your own risk…
Creep on Reading, Pumpkins!