The Skull: A Tyrolean Folktale

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Often this happens, where you have a whole gymnasium of kids – the rowdiest ones – and you’ll tell all your stories, and then at the end they’re all just hyper and they want to go outside, or it’s lunchtime. But you say: ‘Does anybody want to hear a scary story?’ And you could hear a pin drop.” KLASSEN: And she finds a house in the woods, and there's an animate skull living in there. And I thought, that's such a great start for a story. Its plot – if you’ll forgive spoilers for a story of barely 250 words – is a tale of loss, deceit and vigilante ­justice, about a bear who has lost his hat. With implacable solemnity, he asks one animal after another if they have seen it. “I haven’t seen any hats anywhere,” says a shifty, hat-wearing rabbit. “I would not steal a hat. Don’t ask me any more questions.”

When I was little, when I would visit libraries I would go to the scary section, or at least the mystery section. I’d never done a book that fits on that shelf before and this seemed like a good way to do that.” Canadian artist Jon Klassen is talking about his upcoming project The Skull, a deliciously creepy story about a girl, who is fleeing something unknown, and the skull she befriends in a mysterious mansion in the woods. They dance, eat pears, get rid of a skeleton that paces the corridors at night, and this being a Klassen book, there is darkness to the narrative, mysterious parts of the plot that are never fully explained, and humour. The illustrations are, of course, also full of wit and flair. Film is still important to him; indeed, he embarks on each new book with a particular film in mind. This Is Not My Hat, in which a small fish boasts of its stolen bowler before being bumped off mid-book, follows the narrative arc of Psycho, while We Found a Hat, in which two tortoises discover a fedora and can’t decide who should keep it, was inspired by The ­Treasure of the Sierra Madre, with Humphrey Bogart. When I speak to Klassen he is, pleasingly, wearing a hat. “I’ve worn a hat every day since sixth grade,” he says. “I don’t feel ­comfortable without a hat on.” He’s at home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Moranne Keeler, who works in finance – “a great combination because I’ve got no idea how to manage money at all; I draw turtles and then she figures out how to pay the mortgage.”It’s the first time Klassen has dipped a toe in the gothic genre, but he remembers how much he enjoyed ghost stories growing up. “If you do it right, kids love this,” he says. “If you can hold their hand properly and take them through a scary story, they will ­follow you anywhere. Echoes of other forbidding fairy tales pervade this high-stakes telling, in which Otilla’s primal bravery and sly wit result in an arc from flight to mutual reliance.

Give it out at Halloween to your favorite little readers, it would even be a fun gift for an adult trust me. KLASSEN: A lot of my favorite stories - they aren't necessarily about a moral or a lesson. They're just sort of like, I feel better now in a very general way. And that was sort of the idea here. It was like, do you feel better? Like, I think I felt better. This might all sound somewhat Hammer Horror for a book aimed at children as young as six. But as with The Witches, the sense of companionship between Otilla and her eccentric host softens the eeriness. And as the skull reveals his vulnerability, it will fall to the unflappable Otilla to save them both. By the end of the book we still haven’t learned what Otilla was running from, or how the skull lost his body. But we have seen how human sensibilities can turn even the creepiest character into something endearing.

Having eaten pretty much everything on land in 13 previous versions of the classic song, Colandro’s capaciously stomached oldster goes to sea.