Nightmares!

Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller's Nightmares is a spooky fantasy for 10 year olds about a boy who piles boxes against his bedroom door every night to keep a witch out.

What happens

This is where Charlie Laird's story starts. He's twelve and he hasn't had a good night's sleep in three months. That's how long he's lived in the purple mansion on the hill with his dad, his little brother Jack and his new stepmother Charlotte.

Every night the same witch is waiting in his dreams. She has a sickly green face and mirrors where her eyes should be. Her cat is the size of a panther (and it talks). Now she's promised that one night soon she'll come and drag him away for real.

So Charlie does what he can to stay awake. He's tried taping his eyes open, and the duct tape pulled out his eyebrows. At bedtime he shoves thirty-eight packing boxes against the doors. One of those doors is the bathroom, so you can imagine how that goes.

Charlotte is the other problem. She has bright orange hair and a laugh like a cackle. She cooks smelly potions in a black cauldron and her cat hates him. Charlie calls her the stepmonster. You can see where his thinking is heading, can't you?

The part that stays with you is Charlie himself. His mum died just before his ninth birthday and he's still furious with nearly everyone. He calls that anger "the darkness". He's rude to Charlotte, he picks on Jack and he misses the dad who used to laugh at his jokes. He knows he's turned horrible and he can't seem to stop.

It's funny too. The mansion's last owner died at a hundred and ten after a gin rummy accident.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The nightmares are properly frightening. Charlie wakes up tied to a bed in a dungeon while the witch and her cat talk over whether to cage him or eat him. The cage had a skeleton in it the first time he saw it. If your reader already has bad dreams, has lost a parent or is getting used to a new step-parent, this could feel very close to home. If they enjoy being scared and don't mind a hero who isn't always nice, it's a brilliant pick.

What to read next

For another old house with something waiting behind a door, Neil Gaiman's Coraline is in the library too. A bored girl in a new flat finds another mother there, one with black buttons for eyes, who'd very much like her to stay.