HOB GOBLIN AND THE SKELETON

Coville's shaded black-and-white drawings, with their intricate borders of bats, toads, cobwebs, and other Halloween trappings, give a sturdy fullness to Schertle's ugly, pointy-eared little goblin named Hob--and a jaunty panache to his plume-hatted skeleton roommate. All this lends a certain air of substance to the story's dragged-out early pages, in which Hob throws a temper tantrum at the skeleton's atrocious housekeeping and the skeleton walks out, declaring ""You don't want a friend, you want a slave."" Well, a slave is just what Hob does want, or thinks he wants, and so he goes to town to bag a human one--and the next several pages play on the mixups that ensue when Hob hits town on Halloween and the people think he's a costumed trick-or-treater. In the end, Hob is happy to go back to his old friend and share the tidying-up. Schertle's deliberate flourishes and Coville's delight in fleshing things out might put this across; but the story line and the Halloween mixups are pretty creaky.