Halloween Night by Arden Druce ; illustrated by David T. Wenzel.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Discover which spooky characters are lingering in the shadows on the scariest night of the year!

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In this hair-raising tour of a mansion and cornfield, readers confront creatures of the night. Druce (Witch, Witch Come to My Party) generates suspense with rhyming questions that are answered with a trembling turn of the page. A diaphanous form lurks behind a broken window ("Who can walk through closed doors/ with a thud and a thump?/ `I can,' said the ghost"), bats swoop and a skeleton emerges from a crypt. Wenzel's (The Christmas Path) naturalistic watercolors and tilted fields of vision enhance the unsettling ambience. Ages 4-8. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

School Library Journal Review

K-Gr 2-Riddles introduce the characters associated with Halloween, including a witch ("On Halloween Night/when it's dark and scary/who can swoop through the air/with a swish and a flurry?") and a jack-o'-lantern ("On a darkened porch/when the moon is low/who can light a smile/with a shine and a glow?"). Watercolor illustrations of haunted houses, graveyards, ghosts, and trick-or-treating children establish an appropriately spooky mood; however, the occasionally awk- ward rhymes can make reading aloud difficult.-Shara Alpern, The Free Library of Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Ages 3-5. The premise is slight (trick-or-treaters embark on a night of mischief and see spooky sights along the way), but there's still plenty of fun to be had in this guessing game written in rhyme. Each spread, decorated with whimsical illustrations that set a light tone, asks a question that is answered on the following page: "Who can swoop through the air with a swish and a flurry?" "Who can light a smile with a shine and a glow?" The cadence of the rhymes is occasionally jerky, but that won't matter in the least. Sharp-eyed children will find clues in the pictures and won't be able to contain themselves without gleefully shouting out the answer. That's the joy of the book. The illustrations, appropriately dark and rendered from varied perspectives, are well suited to the lively narrative and are sure to please. --Shelley Townsend-Hudson

Horn Book Review

Rhyming questions (In a haunted house, / surrounded by mist, / who can spin / shimmering webs with / a swirl and a twist?) with clues before and answers after a page turn identify familiar motifs of the holiday. The slight text is accompanied by color illustrations that are somewhat, but not [cf2]too[cf1] spooky. From HORN BOOK Spring 2002, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus Book Review

The usual Halloween suspects come out in mildly menacing guises to participate in this simple, rhymed sequence of questions and answers-basically "Who can? I can." In Wenzel's misty watercolors, a witch swoops over moonlit stands of gnarled, leafless trees toward a ramshackle haunted mansion, bats flutter amidst rustling cornstalks, an owl hoots, a skeleton clambers over tumbled gravestones, but "All in their costumes, / ready for fun, / who can frighten / every one?" "WE CAN," responds a porchful of trick-or-treaters, grimacing and wriggling stubby fingers. Though there are no escorting adults in sight, the conventional, decidedly un-mysterious imagery captures the modern tameness of this ancient holiday, and is likely to induce more smiles than shivers in younger children. (Picture book. 4-6)