Something Wickedly Weird 1 – The Wooden Mile

Chris Mould's The Wooden Mile is a spooky, funny island mystery for 8 year olds about a boy who inherits a creepy old house by the sea.

What happens

Stanley Buggles is eleven and he's never even seen the sea. Then a big silvery key lands on the doormat. A great-uncle he never knew has died and left him Candlestick Hall, a huge dark house on the island of Crampton Rock.

The only way across is the Wooden Mile, a footbridge of old planks that vanishes when the tide comes in (Stanley gets very wet feet while a man checks his papers).

This is the first Something Wickedly Weird book and the weirdness piles up fast. A bell rings at dusk and the streets empty in minutes. Every dog Stanley meets seems to be missing a leg. And the stuffed pike in the hallway speaks, just to warn him about someone called William Cake.

Who's William Cake? He runs the sweet shop, and he's got very strange eyes.

Then a scruffy old drinker called Randall Flynn says the sweet-shop man is a werewolf. Flynn and his pirate mates want Stanley to take the silver-bullet pistol from over his own fireplace and do the shooting for them. They can't fire a gun themselves, and the reasons why are gruesome and funny at once.

The storyteller talks straight to you, so it feels like a ghost story told by the fire. Mrs Carelli the housekeeper bosses Stanley about ("You has two ears and one mouth"). And the pirates are revolting in the way kids LOVE, with breath like dead shrimps.

Stanley's lovely company. He'd rather be up a tree watching a kestrel, but he's no pushover. He gets scared, tells himself bravery is facing things anyway, and carries on.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

There's a gory streak. Stanley learns early on that his great-uncle was attacked by an animal in the night and found without his head (that's backstory, not a spoiler). A skeleton hangs in a cage on the hill. One pirate grabs Stanley by the throat and holds a knife to his nose. The pirates drink plenty of ale, and Flynn hits his dog.

A child who frightens easily might find the werewolf talk a lot at bedtime. But if your reader likes their shivers with plenty of jokes, Crampton Rock is a brilliant place to visit.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Pip and the Wood Witch Curse is Chris Mould again, with another storyteller who talks to you and a snowy walled city where an orphan boy has to stay out of sight.