The Screaming Staircase by Jonathan Stroud; read by Miranda Raison (Lockwood & Co.; book 1)

England has a Problem. About 50 years ago, ghosts started appearing. These aren't the poor, lost souls who just need help finishing up one little thing before they can cross over with the help of Jennifer Love Hewitt. These are dangerous ghosts. Some are more dangerous than others, true, but they can all kill you. In fact, by and large, they want to kill you. Also, they can only be seen by children. Of course, you can't fight what you can't see, so the ghost hunters (or "operatives") are all children. Generally, the kids act under the direction of an adult supervisor who can't see the ghosts, but is usually a former operative who does have experience in these things and can provide direction and advice.
Lucy Carlyle's supervisor in her small town is of questionable competence, and she leaves for London after a terrible incident. There are many psychic detection agencies in London, including the two largest, oldest, and most famous -- The Fittes Agency and the Rotwell Agency. Neither hire her. She does get hired by Lockwood & Co., becoming their third member. (The last one died.) There are no adult supervisors at Lockwood & Co., just Anthony Lockwood (who has impressive Sight), George Cubbins (who has great research skills), and Lucy (who can Hear and Sense better than either of them). The agency is in dire straights after Lucy burns down a haunted house (and acquires a murder mystery), so they can't really turn down the next -- very generous -- offer. There's more to the case than meets the eye, however, and more than ghosts to fear.
I enjoy a good horror book. This one, unlike most middle grade horror, occasionally spooked me. I can't put a finger on why. Maybe it was because I was listening to it instead of reading it myself. Probably it was because it was just downright creepy.
Miranda Raison's narration is excellent, with good pacing and clear pronunciation. Each character has a distinct and consistent voice, and you can hear the emotions in the dialog.
Located in the children's area, this book would work well for teens as well as middle graders.
A word of warning -- these books come out in the U.K. before they come out here in the USA. You may find yourself in for a frustrating wait as new books are announced.
--Diane Brown

The Man in the Picture : A Ghost Story / by Susan Hill

Published in 2007 by Overlook Press, The Man in the Picture : A Ghost Story centers on an eighteenth century painting of a Venice carnival scene. Some of the people in the painting look odd. Frightened, even. Gazing out of the painting at the viewer with a "Help me!" look on their faces. The narrator, Oliver, learns the truth of the painting from his old friend Theo, who bought it in younger days. Theo learned about it from Lady Hawdon. Lady Hawdon and her husband had received the painting from Lord Hawdon's former paramour (and expected fiancee, before he met Lady Hawdon) as a wedding gift. A gift that will avenge her broken heart! Although it is subtitled A Ghost Story, there are no ghosts, and it's more of a creepy revenge story. Recommended for people who are still sad that The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery were cancelled. (Perhaps the "ghost" is that of Rod Serling.)

How to Clean a Hippopotamus : a Look at Unusual Animal Partnerships by Steve Jenkins & Robin Page

You may know about the symbiotic relationship between the oxpecker and the African buffalo, or the one between the clownfish and the anemone. But did you know that coyotes and badgers will team up to hunt prairie dogs? When the prairie dogs see danger, they rush into their burrows. The badger digs, sending the rodents to the coyote, which is waiting at the exit. Finding danger there, the prairie dogs turn around and exit into the jaws of the waiting badger. New Zealand's tuatara (a nocturnal reptile) and petrel (a bird active in the daytime) will share a home. The tuatara keeps the petrel's nesting burrow pest-free and defends it against animals that threaten the bird and its eggs. In exchange, it gets a place to sleep during the daytime, when the petrel is away. And, it turns out that the honey badger (or ratel) does care -- at least about the honeyguide! The honeyguide is a bird that will trail a bee back to its hive. The bird isn't strong enough to break into the nest, so it fetches a ratel. Once the ratel has feasted on the honey, the honeyguide enjoys some honeycomb and juicy bee larvae. And the rufous woodpecker and black tree ants will even call a truce in their usually tense relationship while the woodpecker cares for its eggs and rears its young -- protecting the ant nest at the same time. Once the chicks leave home, the woodpecker goes back to eating the ants and the ants go back to stinging the woodpecker!
These are just a few of the symbiotic relationships explored in this fascinating book. The last few pages tell about the size of each animal mentioned in the book, and an end note points out that animals don't enter into these relationships out of friendship, but because the relationships help the animals survive. A bibliography is included.
Written in the style of a graphic novel, brief text accompanies illustrations of cut and torn paper. Written for early elementary ages, it has a Lexile score of 950.

Rot and Ruin

Rot and Ruin, by Jonathan Maberry, is the first book in a series, though it reads well on its own. It's a coming-of-age story set 14 years after the Zombie apocalypse. In this story, the zombies are more of a backdrop to the dynamics of family and friendship, of growing up convinced of the rightness of your opinions and having experience cast those opinions into doubt.

The book focuses on 15 year old Benny Imura. Benny was only 18 months old on First Night, but he remembers the important part -- his dad reanimating, his mom handing him to his much older half-brother, Tom, and telling Tom to run. He even remembers what his mom was wearing -- a white blouse with red sleeves. And he remembers that Tom ran. He didn't help Benny's mom, not then, not ever. Benny hates him for that. Everyone in their new hometown of Mountainside thinks that Tom is some sort of super brave guy, but Benny knows the truth -- Tom is nothing but a coward. He's also a bounty hunter (he prefers the term "closure specialist") who kills zoms. He never talks about it, though, so Benny's pretty sure he does it in a cowardly way. Not like bounty hunters Charley Matthias and the Motor City Hammer. They're always talking about how they kill zoms, sometimes even going mano-a-mano! They're cool. They're real men. Not like Tom.

When, at 15, Benny has to get a job or have his rations cut in half, he ends up apprenticing to Tom. What he learns on that first "closure" gives him pause for thought. A mission to find a feral girl and shut down the infamous "Gameland" has him re-evaluating his most deeply held beliefs about Tom, about First Night, about what makes a monster -- and what makes a hero. Available in print, audio CD, and downloadable eBook, Rot and Ruin is a zombie novel well worth the read.

Benno and the Night of Broken Glass

It is a question as old as the 1940s -- how do you introduce young children to the horror of the Holocaust in a way they can understand, but that won't overwhelm them? In the picture book Benno and the Night of Broken Glass, Meg Wiviott answers this questions quite well. The story uses the conceit of telling about Benno the cat to introduce Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) and the beginning of the Holocaust. Events are described without explanation. Benno knows that people are less happy since the men in brown shirts showed up, but not why. He doesn't understand why Inge, (who gives him schnitzel after Sunday dinner) no longer walks to school or plays with Sophie (who gives him chicken after Sabbath supper).

Nor does he know why, one night, the men in brown shirts break into Moshe the butcher's shop and overturn his refrigerators. They rip up Mitzi Stein's fabric and throw the sewing machines at her dress shop into the street. They leave Herr Gerber's grocery alone. Hans the Hausmeister, who gives Benno fresh milk every night, lets the men in brown shirts into the apartment building and points out certain apartments. The men take away Professor Goldfarb. They break the furniture in Sophie's apartment, but not in Inge's. They even set fire to the beautiful Neue Synagogue. The next day, Benno waits for Sophie so he can walk to school with her, but she never comes out of her apartment.

Life goes on for cats, just as it does for children. Both, being powerless, must adjust. Benno still watches Inge's father leave for work. He still follows Inge to school. Frau Gerber still scratches his ears, and Hans still gives him fresh milk. But nothing is ever the same.

An afterword provides information on Kristallnacht, including the fact that few nations spoke out against the events, indicating to the Nazis that the world would tolerate such persecution. A bibliography giving sources and additional children's books about the Holocaust is included.

The book provides a good introduction to the topic for early elementary school age children, while leaving it to parents to determine the appropriate amount of background information and explanation to provide to an individual child.

Brimstone and Marmalade by Aaron Corwin

Brimstone and Marmalade is a short story by Aaron Corwin, published on the Tor website. It's a delightful, surprisingly sweet, little gem of a tale about a little girl who desperately wants a pony for her birthday. Instead, she gets a demon. This is presented as a perfectly normal and reasonable activity -- pet demons can be cool (unless you want a pony), but aren't unusual by any means. And, as Mathilde's Nana points out, they can be great for convincing parents that a little girl is responsible enough to care for a pony.

It takes Mathilde a while to warm up to Ix'thor, but warm up to him she does. And Ix'thor seems to like her. When she asks him his name, he tells her at once. When mean Billy throws her collage in the mud, Ix'thor suggests she "destroy the interloper." Or at least feed him to the ravenous tongue-beasts of Garakh'nurr. (Mathilde doesn't know where that is.) She gets lots of candy when she takes Ix'thor along for Trick-or-Treating. ("Ix'thor says fear keeps the peasants in line.") And when tragedy, in the form of the horrible Becky, strikes, it isn't a pony that Mathilde wants. It's Ix'thor. She can't have him, though. Even miniature Dark Lords are weakened by sunlight, and after Ix'thor's darkened ball breaks, there's nothing the man from the demon shop can do. Perhaps a pony with glowing red eyes, then. One that will allow Mathilde to crush her enemies' skulls beneath its flaming hooves.

This story captures the feelings of not getting what you want, and then coming to like what you didn't want; of the loss of a beloved pet; of the trials that come with the Billys and Beckys of the world. 

Recommended for people who like a bit of humor with their horror.

Squidges: Ix'thor is a demon, even if he does come across as more grandiose than evil. (He eats prepackaged grub souls, which are souls nonetheless. He suggests that Mathilde give him her soul in exchange for limitless power. (She turns him down.) It is implied that he either threatens people into giving Mathilde more candy on Hallowe'en or encourages her to threaten them. He and Mathilde may or may not have a greater plan for world domination.)

Check out Tor's website for more speculative fiction short stories.

The Panic Virus : a True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear by Seth Mnookin

Mnookin traces the opposition to vaccination from Colonial America to current times, focusing largely on the recent autism scare. The book is written in an engaging, accessible style. Technical terms are defined, and the footnotes are worth reading.
Early opposition to smallpox inoculation came in two basic forms: the disgust factor -- inoculation was achieved by rubbing smallpox pus into an open wound to cause a mild case of the disease that would confer immunity -- and the belief that the disease was divine punishment and interfering with it was interfering with God's will. Cotton Mather, a supporter of smallpox inoculation, had his house firebombed. (Later, cowpox infection was used to prevent smallpox. The word "vaccine" comes from the Latin term for the cowpox virus, variolae vaccinae.) Later opposition had considerably less to do with God's will than distrust of the government. Such distrust, as regards vaccination, was not always misplaced. Poor oversight and weak reporting rules allowed bad batches of vaccines to infect, injure, and kill. And while Mnookin spends some time on these tragedies, he devotes most of his book to the thoroughly discredited beliefs that thimerosal and the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine cause autism, and the terrible results of failure to vaccinate. (Read about thimerosal here: http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/thimerosal/)
Mnookin lays blame for the modern vaccine scare squarely on two parties -- Andrew Wakefield and the press. Wakefield first raised the alarm about the measles component in the MMR vaccine, claiming that the three-in-one jab overloaded children's immune systems and that the measles component should be delivered separately. (At the time, he and a partner were developing just such a vaccine.) His research methods were so poorly documented that it was not possible for other scientists to replicate his work. The mountain of evidence against his proposal was dismissed by Wakefield and his desperate followers as proof of a conspiracy to harm kids, at worst, or fail to protect them, at best. (Mnookin also explains why Wakefield's followers continue to support him. Having been told there is nothing that can be done to help their children, that they simply lost the genetic crap shoot -- or worse, caused their children's autism with their own bad parenting -- they found in Wakefield someone who both listened to them and gave them hope. In the cases presented in the book, parents made the "vaccine connection" only after being told there was one. This was sometimes months or even years later. Add to that the natural human tendency to hold tighter to beliefs when they are challenged, and parents' continued support of Wakefield and belief in his discredited ideas becomes easier to understand.)
Still, Wakefield's ideas wouldn't have gained traction without one more ingredient: exposure. Every time a news outlet refers to vaccines as "controversial", when vaccine conspiracy theorists with no background in public health or immunology are treated as experts, when anecdote is regarded as evidence, the ugly balloon-and-sheet ghost rises from its grave to frighten parents. And some of them (mostly liberal, well-educated whites) will choose to forgo or delay vaccination. The result is a resurgence of diseases like measles, hib, and whooping cough that have been gone from the U.S.A. for so long that many doctors don't recognize the symptoms. In some communities, herd immunity (also called community immunity) has already been compromised -- something to remember if you're planning to take your not-fully-immunized baby to Ashland, Oregon. (Read more about herd immunity here: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/pages/communityimmunity.aspx)