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The Box of Delights by John Masefield is a snowy, sinister Christmas fantasy for 9 year olds about a boy coming home from school into something very strange indeed.
Kay Harker changes trains at a freezing junction. He has lost his ticket, two men on the bench beside him are clearly detectives, and there is an Irish terrier called Barney nosing at his knees.
The dog belongs to a small, worn old man with a great case in green baize on his back and eyes as bright as a bird's. He finds Kay's ticket for him without appearing to look. He knows Kay's name and Kay has never met him.
Then he asks Kay to carry a message. Go into the muffin shop. Find the woman with the gold cross and garnets on her ring. Tell her the Wolves are Running.
Kay does it, and from that moment the town starts answering back. A rider stops him in the snow wearing the same ring and tells him to say Someone's safe. The rider, Kay half thinks afterwards, was a stag.
Masefield is extraordinary at weather and menace. The market place empties. The carved beasts on the old houses crouch against the wind. There is a stab of yellow and red over the woods and all the sky is grim. Very little has actually happened yet and your reader will already be uneasy.
Two things a parent should know before handing this over.
The first is a nasty passage in the opening chapter, within a few pages of the start. A railway porter, spinning Kay a yarn about the man the detectives are chasing, cheerfully describes a murderer who cut up his father-in-law, put him through the mincer and sold him to the dog's meat man. He adds that the man will get the rope. It is done as a tall tale and Kay later doubts every word, but a young reader meets it straight, and it is not the only dark corner. There is talk of cock-fighting and dog-fighting at the wharf pub a few chapters on.
The second is the reading level. This is an old book and it reads like one. The sentences are long and coiled, the vocabulary is period English, and children in it are "scrobbled" rather than kidnapped. As a read-aloud with a grown up it is wonderful, particularly at Christmas. Left to a child to manage alone, the period prose can still be heavy going.
There is an earlier book about this same boy, in the same big old house. The Midnight Folk has talking animals, a great-grandfather's lost treasure and a governess who is not remotely what she claims to be.
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