Children’s book reviews: Forces of good and evil do battle in terrifying tales

Her hopes of a marriage that will raise her from poverty being distant, Gráinne has long since resigned herself to remaining single. 

One night, however, the sound of horses’ hooves is heard coming to a halt outside their cottage.

At the door appears a tall stranger, his clothes old-fashioned and his face hidden by the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat.

Though both women are disconcerted, the man appears courteous and wants only to be allowed to pay visits to Gráinne, in return for which he offers them gold coins as a “token of his earnestness”.

The coins are old and sufficiently valuable to transform the women’s financial circumstances. So, reluctantly, they agree.

Having spent his money, they cannot refuse the man’s subsequent visits and he becomes the family’s elderly benefactor, mother and daughter learning to tolerate his sour smell and aversion to revealing his face or accepting food and drink.

The day comes, though, when the man asks for Gráinne’s hand in marriage. 

Despite being repulsed by the suggestion, the thought of returning to poverty prompts her to accept — with the expectation that her new husband is soon destined for the grave and that she will inherit his wealth.

Unluckily for Gráinne, it is she who is soon destined for the grave as she walks up the aisle with a groom whose skin is “speckled with mould and stretched tight across his skull”.

“There was a cavity in one of his cheeks where the flesh had rotted away to reveal the yellow teeth inside. The nose too, had fallen away, leaving a triangular hole.”

Of Gráinne, there is no trace the next day — save for a freshly-cut inscription on the groom’s ancient family tombstone, now bearing her name.

Superbly spooky, this story from Monaghan is one of 32 haunting tales, one from each county in Ireland, expertly told by Navan schoolteacher Kieran Fanning.

Well-known stories include Wexford’s ‘Ghost of Loftus Hall’ and that of Alice Kyteler, ‘The Witch of Kilkenny’, who is depicted on the compendium’s cover — though it was Alice’s maid, Petronella, who had the dubious honour of being the first woman in Ireland or Britain to be burned at the stake for witchcraft.

From Cork comes the tragic tale of Wilful Warender/Warrender ‘The White Lady of Kinsale’, who wanders Charles Fort, having jumped to her death after her father mistakenly shot her new husband on their wedding day.

‘The Ghost Hurlers of Reen’ in Co Kerry make an appearance, as does Waterford’s ‘Ghost of Glencairn Abbey’, along with the relatively modern Satanic sighting of ‘The Devil in the Dance Hall’, recalling a much-publicised 1954 incident when a cloven-footed visitor joined the revellers at Monsignor James Horan’s Tooreen dancehall.

With a map plotting the location of the 32 featured haunts, this is a glorious ghost-hunter’s guide which is guaranteed to raise the spirits this Halloween.

Black Gables by Eibhlís Carcione (Everything With Words, €10.44)

Ever had one of those school days from hell, when both teachers and fellow pupils seem to be going out of their way to make your life a complete misery?

Welcome to the everyday reality of Rosella Frawley. She and her family have recently moved to her mother’s childhood home at Black Gables, in the hope that its familiarity will aid the return of her mother’s memory, lost as the result of an accident.

The village, on a desolate lake shore, takes its name from the imposing gables that loom over the entrance to the local school, relics of the workhouse which once stood there.

The decrepit school within is as sinister as the dark waters of the lake, and its staff more openly malevolent than the cast of a B-horror movie.

Headmaster Mr Edge, with his “black rotting teeth and purplish ulcers the same colour as his cravat”, rules the school by fear, accompanied always by his evil-eyed skunk rat Mr Nibbles.

His staff are of the same ilk, notably the draconian maths teacher Ms Bugly and slovenly Ms Rocks — who carries her pet crow Cordelia in a cage and wears a deeply unattractive “knobbly cardigan over dirty pink pyjamas”.

Though the revolting teachers’ penchant for Chocolate Emeralds and Kimberley biscuits does nothing to sweeten their behaviour towards the students, their food choices are among the few distinctly Irish influences to emerge from the novel’s gothic gloom.

Rosella’s new classmates, the Glen Kids, act as the spying eyes of the terrifying teachers, ensuring her first weeks at Black Gables are spent in constant fear of being set impossible tasks and sentenced to detention for “crimes” she has not committed.

Her attempts to tell her father about the misery she is suffering prove futile. 

Mr Edge twists the truth, portraying Rosella as a miscreant intent on causing trouble at the mouldering institution which its pupils are brainwashed into calling “the best school in the world”.

Despite her collection of porcelain dolls, evoking a Twilight Zone aura, and her name conjuring an expectation of deadly intent, Ms Nightshade is the only teacher at Black Gables who may offer Rosella a glimmer of hope.

Though a resourceful, courageous central character, she will need all the hope and help she can get if she is to unveil the dark secrets that haunt the village and discover what lurks beneath the lake’s shadowy surface.

Told through the unsettling first-person narrative of Rosella, who is sometimes a step behind the reader in perceiving her own peril, this is the second chillingly creepy early-teen novel from Cork’s Eibhlís Carcione, author of Welcome to Dead Town Raven McKay.

Midnight Treasure by Piers Torday (Quercus, €24.65)

Werewolves and vampires are traditionally cast as the bad guys, but Piers Torday makes central characters of ‘werwolf’ Tibor and his friend Roza, a ‘vampir’ in Alsatian form, both adopted by Baron Ambrus and living in his House of Gold.

The approaching Halloween, known as Spectre Night, will see Tibor turn 13 — heralding his ability to fully transform into a wolf.

When a powerful wizard arrives at the vampir baron’s House of Gold, she presents Tibor with an ancient figurine and the quest he must undertake to find the Midnight Treasure is revealed.

It’s a quest to test even the immortality of werwolf and vampir, and one where among a cast of brilliantly-imagined characters the difference between friend and foe is constantly obscured.