When wolves go bump in the night

The Wolves in the Walls, a new children’s book from the critically lauded tandem of writer Neil Gaiman and illustrator Dave McKean, is a deliciously creepy book. It elicits the kind of goose bumps kids love to inflict upon themselves and to embarrassingly paranoid adults. Thus every intelligent seven-year-old on the planet (whether still a child or a grown-up) should get a copy of it for Halloween, a tale-of-a-treat to be read out loud with all the funny voices and weird sound effects a good picture book should be accompanied by.

Lucy – sensible, earnest, if not too droll for a little girl her age – suspects that wolves are lurking behind the walls of their house, hatching mischievous, wolfish plots. She tries her best to cry wolf but no one, predictably, believes her: not her tuba-playing Dad, not her jam-making Mom and, rather annoyingly, not even her younger brother (who’s much too preoccupied with whatever it is younger brothers are preoccupied with these days).

Lucy, of course, was right. And one day, the wolves came out of the walls.

The wolves drive Lucy’s family away and make themselves comfortable in the house: playing loud music, watching TV all day, sliding down staircases, and smearing the walls with homemade jam. It’s just like what everybody says, "When the wolves come out of the walls, it’s all over!"

Fortunately for Lucy’s beleaguered family, all is not over – thanks to Lucy’s own spunk, as well as for her love for her graying, stuffed pig-puppet.

The Wolves in the Walls is a marked improvement from Gaiman and McKean’s first children’s book collaboration, The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish, published some five years ago. While a playfully fun romp, the conceit of the latter book lies in the suspicion that it is a story for adults (male adults to be precise) parading as one for kids. The naughty humor, the boy mischief and logic, even the not-too-subtle, pre-nursery quality of McKean’s art, is geared more to delight the grown-up traipsing back to the self-altered memory of his childhood with a morbid chuckle. While kids may like it, they won’t like the book as much as, say, their unmarried uncles, older cousins, or even as the beaus of their big sisters would.

With The Wolves in the Walls, Gaiman and McKean, known for their seminal work on the award-winning Sandman series of graphic novels, strikes a fine balance of childish wit and adult silliness to craft a children’s picture book to delight, to spook and – if all is fair in the world – to endure. This tale is one to be told by grown-ups and listened to by children. Eagerly.

The artwork in Wolves is simply gorgeous, as should be expected from the illustriously inventive McKean. The book employs a clever mix of expressive ink drawings (hints and shades of Edward Gorey) and opulent photo-paint collages, with figures rendered in tribute to Lane Smith’s (The True Tale of the 3 Little Pigs, James and the Giant Peach).

McKean’s overall art design ostensibly employs the narrative tricks he acquired from his extensive comic book background. He sets a comfortable pace for the tale to unfold, breaking down scenes into panels, visually toning down in some parts while causing images to leap in others. There is none of the mad clutter of colors and crude scribbles that made the earlier children’s book collaboration a tad difficult to read (though, I might add, nonetheless enjoyable).

Neil Gaiman’s prose in this book is endearing, with a whimsical rhythm that is a delight to the ear when read aloud. While sparse, the language is potent, requiring only as much words as are needed to sensibly sketch out the nuances of characters and of the cheerfully bleak atmosphere. Gaiman obviously had fun writing this book, the goofiness of which ebbs and flows long before he lets loose his pack of partying wolves. If Wolves has any perceptible fault (if one can call it that), is that it came out too soon after the successful publication of Coraline, a beautiful, dark novel for young adults likewise written by the prolific Gaiman and with a set of illustrations by McKean. The effect of the near simultaneous release, at least for the duo’s persnickety cult following, is that it dampens the originality of the later book, with Coraline obviously serving as a well-source for both the style and feel of Wolves. But I’m nitpicking.

Wolves is many things as a book. It is, in no particular order, funny, adorable, charming, enchanting, lavish, elegant, fantastic, delightful, eerie at times, scary in places (though only in silly, silly ways), weird, eccentric, flamboyant, outrageous, riotous, and – because it reminds us that children are oftentimes smarter and braver than adults – even comfortingly wise.