The Skull

“Jon Klassen is dominating the micro-niche of creepy existential horror stories for the six-to eight-set. (My kid was so freaked out by the eyeball alien in THE ROCK FROM THE SKY that after we read it, we had to hide it on the back of the bookshelf for two years.) In this droll and deadpan tale, Ottilla is on the run; from what, who can say? She finds a house inhabited by a skull; it is chased nightly by a headless skeleton. With a bucket, a rolling pin, some tea, and some nerve, she finds her way to a happy—or happy enough—ever after.”

“Easy chapter book about a girl who runs away from home and befriends a skull and when the skeleton body comes after it, she saves her friend by smashing the skeleton’s bones and throwing them into a bottomless pit. Perfectly dark; I would have been obsessed with this at 7.”