Halloween books for kids tend to come in two sizes. Picture books, which a nine-year-old will not be seen dead with, and middle-grade horror, which is a bit much for the seven-year-old who still wants the landing light on. In between there is not a lot — and what there is gets read once, on the night, and never again.
Trick or Treat sits in that gap on purpose. It is a choose-your-path gamebook for ages 7-12: spooky enough to feel like Halloween, never actually frightening, and built so that the same book gives you a different night every time you open it.
The premise
It is Halloween night. You are dressed as a mummy. And the costumes in your neighborhood have started walking around on their own. An empty vampire paces up and down asking for tomato juice. A witch with nobody inside sweeps the grass in the park. The skeleton on the corner picks its own femur up off the ground and apologises.
Mrs. Amber, from the costume shop Amber's Trunk, has lost a spool of silver thread she should never have lost. If that thread is not back on the spool before the twelve chimes of midnight, the costumes stay awake forever — and the kids wearing them stay inside. You have until midnight, a little brother called Bruno who is dressed as a dinosaur and refuses to take the head off, and a neighborhood full of costumes that are not entirely on your side.
How scary is it, really?
This is the question every parent asks first, so here is the honest answer. The tone is the tone of Halloween itself: pumpkins, a pirate in the vacant lot, a clock ticking towards midnight. The costumes are odd rather than menacing — the running joke is that they are mostly polite about it. Nothing jumps out. Nobody gets hurt. A cautious seven-year-old can read it at bedtime; a twelve-year-old will enjoy the mystery without finding it babyish.
If you want a wider view of what counts as "not too scary" at this age, we put together a whole list of not-too-scary Halloween books for 7-12s — this one is on it, but so are several others.
Why it works as a gamebook
At the end of every section you decide what to do and jump to the section it tells you. Do you take Bruno with you or leave him with the neighbours? Do you negotiate with the pirate? Do you search the thread storeroom, or run for the square before the clock strikes twelve? Every path tells a different Halloween night, and there are more than 12 ways for it to end.
That is what makes it different from the usual seasonal read. A normal Halloween book gets its one evening and then goes back on the shelf until next October. A gamebook gets played again on the 1st of November, because the path your child did not take is still sitting there. In our experience the first read-through is the shortest one; it is the second and third where they slow down and start to explore.
Ways to use it this October
- The countdown read. Start it a week or two before Halloween, one or two sections a night, and let your child make the decisions. It builds the anticipation better than any decoration.
- The party book. Read it aloud to a group and vote on each decision. Kids argue about the choices far more than they would about a story that is simply told to them.
- The alternative to a bag of sweets. If you would rather give a small gift than more sugar, a $3.99 ebook or a $10.99 paperback is a very easy swap.
- The reluctant-reader trap. A child who "doesn't like reading" usually does like Halloween. The theme gets the book open; the decisions keep it open.
The practical details
Trick or Treat is book 21 in the Decide Your Destiny series, for ages 7-12, with full-colour illustrations. Kindle $3.99, paperback $10.99, hardcover $29.99. Get it on Amazon, browse the full collection, or, if your child has never tried a gamebook, start with our free one, The Portal, and see whether the format clicks before the big night.