Krankenstein’s Crazy House of Horror

Krankenstein's Crazy House of Horror by Jeremy Strong is a comic horror story for 8 year olds that begins with a pair of second-hand pyjamas.

What happens

Charlie likes a quiet life. He is startled by almost everything, including birds flying past in the distance, and he lives with three younger sisters who between them produce roughly the energy of a firework factory going up.

His best mate Ben is the opposite. Ben bounces off the ceiling, literally, and is always in trouble or just climbing out of it.

The problem this weekend is homework. Mrs Rumble, known throughout the school as Crumblebag on account of smelling of cabbage, wants a true story about yourself. Charlie is certain nothing interesting has ever happened to him.

The argument that follows is the funniest thing in the book. Charlie recites his true story, which goes home from school, fish and chips, telly, bed, the end. Ben points out that he's left out the part where Crumblebag tells him off for being boring and for starting every sentence with "then".

Then Charlie puts on the new pyjamas his mum got from a charity shop. They're covered from top to toe in tiny pictures of planets, castles, kings, pyramids and animals, and the label calls them Cosmic Pyjamas.

One of the pictures is a dark house. Charlie says it moved. Ben says pictures don't move. A tiny bolt of lightning flickers in the clouds behind it, Ben touches it to have a closer look, and the pair of them are gone.

Charlie arrives sprawled across a slippery floor. Ben arrives head first in a giant basin of tomato soup.

What they've landed in belongs to the Stitcher, an ancient woman who has built her own wheelchair out of an old tea trolley. Her desk is piled with scissors, needles, bits of cannibalised computer and, mixed in among it all, body parts. Arms, legs, eyeballs, the lot.

Strong flags this himself. There's a warning printed on the page in capitals telling squeamish readers to skip the next bit, which tells you exactly what sort of book it is. The horror is cartoonish and the jokes never stop, but a reader who lies awake after a ghost story will not thank you for it. A child who giggles at gruesome things will read the warning and dive straight in.

It rattles along too. Short chapters, capitals for shouting, and every crash spelled out across the page.

What to read next

Those pyjamas get around, by the way. In Doctor Bonkers a girl called Rosie finds a new itchy pair with a scrap of paper tucked inside, and she and her brothers end up somewhere far stranger than their bedroom.