THE GHOST WHO SAVED HALLOWEEN

A round-headed, big-eyed ghost produces light for the neighborhood on Halloween night.

Anyong uses the first line and meter of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” for the opening stanzas of this rhymed saga: “Once upon a mid-night dreary / While I pondered weak and weary.” The narrator, a ghost with a box of memorabilia and a “congratulations on retiring card” nearby, is awakened from a snooze by “someone gently rap, rap, rapping.” Costumed children are at the door. Surprised, the ghost screeches, rattles chains, and tosses a red-eyed spider companion into the crowd to spook the trick-or-treaters, who remain unfazed. When one announces that there’s no candy to be had here, they all decide to move on, but the ghost, still eager to frighten them, retreats to build an elaborate machine. Unfortunately, the contraption blows a fuse, throwing street and sidewalks into darkness. It takes some ghostly ingenuity to brighten things up again. Clunky verse with often forced rhymes “Halloween is just so trying. / A century of children eyeing, / ‘CANDY! CANDY! CANDY!’”) makes for an awkward read-aloud. The trick to getting past that, though, is to focus on the treat: Quarles’ vibrantly colored, spirited illustrations, depicting a blithely comical ghost and amusing details for eagle-eyed readers to spot. The youngsters vary in skin tone.

A visually inviting adventure for spooky season.