Nightmares! 2 – The Sleepwalker Tonic

Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller's The Sleepwalker Tonic is a funny horror story for 10 year olds about a town that has stopped sleeping.

What happens

This is the second book about Charlie Laird, and it helps to know where he's got to. Home is a lilac-painted mansion on the hill above Cypress Creek, shared with his dad, his little brother Jack and his stepmother Charlotte. At the top of it is an eight-sided room with a door in it. The door leads to the Netherworld, where nightmares live, and this family's job is to keep it shut.

It is shut. Charlie checks. Then he checks again.

The trouble is the man who has just shuffled into the Cypress Creek hardware store with his head resting on one shoulder, his eyes barely open and drool down his shirt. He buys paint. He walks into a lamppost. Then he bursts out of the back of a moving ambulance without ever appearing to wake up.

He's from Orville Falls, half an hour up the road, where nobody has slept for days and a smiling little man has just opened a shop selling something called Tranquility Tonic.

The best company here is Charlie's friend Alfie, who is twelve and a genius and desperate for an adult to take him seriously for once. He diagnoses the shuffling man as the walking dead with a completely straight face, then produces a torch from his backpack to check the poor man's pupils.

Charlie's sleeping life is where the jokes really are. He drops off and meets three retired zombies who have given up scaring people and taken jobs in the Dream Realm instead, doing Halloween memories and video game walkthroughs. One of them is missing both ears and tells Charlie he's all ears.

Some of it is properly creepy, mind. It opens with a frightened woman alone in a newspaper office at half past ten at night, refusing to let her eyes close, and the man who comes through the door is not a nice man. If your reader enjoys being scared, that opening is the selling point. If they don't, you'll know within a page.

There's real worry sitting underneath as well. Charlotte's herb shop is losing customers, the family needs money, and Charlie finds that out by overhearing his parents rather than being told.

What to read next

For more monsters getting out where they shouldn't, The Stone Child does much the same trick. A boy moves to a new town, finds a coded book by his favourite horror writer that was never published, and the creatures in it start turning up in the woods.