Top Halloween Book Picks

If you were to take all of our Halloween books and line them up end to end, they would reach 1/3rd of the length of a football field. We store all of our Halloween books in a black bin in storage that we only pull out for the month of October. Here are some of our family's favorites:



The top unanimous favorite is: The Hallo-Wiener by Dav Pilkey. We actually own two copies of this book one for the Halloween box and one for our regular bookshelf. The story of a Wiener Dog who gets mocked and bullied until his own unique skills save the day makes us all cheer. And laugh. We never tire of reading this one.

Funny, amazing, hilarious, cool, and neat, neat , neat. We love all Daniel Pinkwater children's books. He has a strange, yet childlike look at the world that we really enjoy.
The Bones of Fred McFee has fabulous rhyming and creates a great mood, both with the pictures and the cadence of the rhyme. It leaves the mystery of the book a bit unsolved, which we seem to like too.



Don't Look At It is partly so popular at our house, because I use the kids' names in place of the characters in the story. There is a lot of suspense as characters keep disappearing, but a really happy ending.
In a Dark, Dark Room is an Early Reader book with a bunch of short stories that are "just scary enough" for kids that don't really like scary stories.


I'm not really sure why the kids love Alice and Greta so much. But the tale of a good witch and a bad witch, and the "boomerang effect" really attracts them. They fought over who got to read this one first when we pulled out the Halloween books this year. It's not one of my favorites, but they insisted we put it on.
Skeleton Hiccups is so funny; simple text with lots of "hiccing" in between each phrase. Look at the pictures carefully, both to see how the hiccups effect his ability to perform tasks as well as how the standard hiccup cures are rather problematic for a skeleton.

And finally we come to our new discoveries for Halloween 2008. Bone Soup was written by a recent BYU graduate. It's a twist on Stone Soup, Halloween style. Thanks Tutu for getting us into this one.
And Vunce Upon a Time is brand spanking new. These same authors wrote one of our favorite Christmas books, "Olive the Other Reindeer". This Halloween story featured the same funny storyline twists, and the same slightly odd pictures. A vegetarian vampire decides to dress up in the scariest costume he can think of to get some free candy on Halloween. What is scary to all vampires? GARLIC. All of the kids loved it--especially (and surprising to me) Lachlan, our 16 month old. He loves to gaze at the end page which has candy arranged by variety in the coffin of the little vampire.