The Joy of Spooking – Fiendish Deeds

P. J. Bracegirdle's Fiendish Deeds opens The Joy of Spooking, a gleefully gloomy mystery for 9 year olds.

What happens

Spooking sits on top of a hill. Crumbling mansions, a graveyard full of leaning headstones, a locked library, a playground that looks like a crashed bomber and an asylum blocking out the sun.

Down below is Darlington, where everything is new and the lawns all match.

Joy Wells lives up top and thinks Darlington is beneath contempt.

Her family ended up in Spooking because you get a great deal more house for your money there. Her mother is a philosophy professor who explained what existentialism was and has been keeping Joy awake ever since. Her father is a lawyer who will not light a fire because it is warm enough, he says, in a room where you can see your own breath.

Her little brother Byron can cross a floor of groaning boards without a single creak, which makes him unbeatable at hide-and-seek. Joy has a bullfrog called Fizz who barks and eats dog treats.

The story proper starts with a book. An old lady in the town died and left Joy her collected works of E. A. Peugeot, horror stories, first edition, willed to "a spirited young Spooking lady with a taste for mystery". Joy has never met her. She reads it under the covers into the early hours anyway.

Meanwhile a man in a large black car is driving round the cemetery in the rain, writing names off headstones into a little leather notebook.

The narrator's voice is what makes it. Everything dreadful is told with enormous relish, and the funniest bits are the small ones, like the class book report on a TV tie-in where the boy cheerfully gives away the ending to spare everyone the trouble.

The other thing is school. Every morning the bus goes down the hill and the Darlington children line up to scream at the Spooking children as they get off, and no adult ever does anything about it. It's played for laughs and Joy is tough about it, but it's relentless and it's the ordinary sort of nastiness rather than the monster sort. If your reader is having a rough time at school themselves, that may be closer to home than the ghosts are.

The corpse jokes are cheerful rather than gory, by the way. The old lady is found mummified in her armchair holding an unfinished needlepoint of a duck in sunglasses.

What to read next

For another girl who reads ghost stories and then finds herself in one, try The Haunting of Aveline Jones. Aveline gets packed off to a freezing Cornish seaside town for half term and turns up a spooky old book that used to belong to a girl who vanished.