Favorite children's books for Halloween

October is always a good time to try out the spooky favorites, especially in an era seeing the popularity of zombie and vampire-centered movies.

The popular series for elementary school children almost all have a Halloween favorite:  The Berenstein Bears and the Spooky Old Tree.  Clifford's First Halloween.  Arthur's Halloween.  And Jack and Annie from the Magic Tree House star in a Merlin adventure called Haunted House on Hallow's Eve.

Jack Prelutsky has a poetry book called It's Halloween, and Gail Gibbons, my favorite author of nonfiction children's books, has written an informative and easy-to-follow book called Halloween Is...

And older kids can enjoy Edgar Allan Poe's classic scary stories, The Tell-Tale Heart, which speaks as much to guilt as fear, and The Raven.

One less-mentioned story by an award-winning author is The Trip by Ezra Jack Keats.  He is better known for his Caldecott Medal for A Snowy Day, and this book uses a similar setting--a boy in an urban environment--and similar illustrations.  Louie, the main character, has moved away from his old neighborhood and misses his friends.  He builds a "shadow box," as we called them when I was a kid, and looks inside, visualizing himself in a plane over the skyline, landing in his old neighborhood and seeing his friends in their Halloween costumes.  In the end, Louie's mother encourages him to put down the shadow box, put on his costume and go outside...where friends are waiting.

Not spooky at all, and a good story about friendship.