The Fantastic Frame 4 – Look Out! Ghost Mountain Below

Lin Oliver's Look Out! Ghost Mountain Below is a magic-painting adventure for 7 year olds with a deadline attached.

What happens

Tiger Brooks lives next door to the strangest person in the neighbourhood. Viola Dots is nearly eighty, hasn't left her house in fifty years, paints copies of famous artworks all day, and has a talking orange pig called Chives for a butler.

She also has a golden picture frame in her living room. At four o'clock, which Tiger and his friend Luna call the hour of power, it pulls you into whatever painting is sitting in it.

You get one hour. Miss it and you stay in the painting for ever.

That's what happened to Viola's son David, fifty years ago, and it's why she keeps painting. She's hoping he turns up in one.

This time the painting is Georgia O'Keeffe's Red Hills with the Pedernal. The Pedernal is a real place, a New Mexico butte with a flat top like a knife blade. Tiger and Luna are going to climb it.

Two things make it harder than usual. Chives has decided he's coming, dressed for mountaineering in a tank top, a mop and a yellow bucket on his head. And the mountain is sacred, and Chives has mentioned, unhelpfully, that some people believe spirits live up there.

Luna does not like ghosts. She's spent the day practising her brave face.

It's Tiger who tells you the story and he's very easy to be with. He opens by explaining that every neighbourhood has one really weird person in it, and gives you a list.

There's a lot of heart in the small stuff too. Luna carries her grandpa's drum because her grandma says you can feel his heartbeat in it, and her dad is away in Texas with his army unit. When the street bully turns up, she counts him down from ten and he cycles off.

Tomorrow is also Viola's eightieth birthday, and the fiftieth anniversary of the day David vanished. So there's more riding on this trip than the usual hour.

Fair warning for the nervous. It opens on a ghost film with a fog creature reaching for the sofa, and the spookiness is the whole flavour of the book. It's all played for a shiver rather than a fright, but it is very much about being scared of things.

What to read next

This one sits fourth in the series, and while the setup is explained again from scratch, a reader who likes it will want to start at the beginning. In the first Fantastic Frame book, Tiger has just moved in, has no idea what's next door, and gets pulled into a Rousseau jungle with a tiger in it.