The end of October brings a burst of creativity and spookiness, as Halloween takes centre stage in the Western world. Halloween, celebrated on October 31st, is a holiday where people of all ages dress up in costumes, carve pumpkins, and embark on a candy-collecting adventure known as trick-or-treating. Here at Daisyroots Books we enjoy collating books that focus on a theme, so here are several ‘spooky’ Folio books that are now in our collection
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively. This is a First printing of the Folio Society edition. With illustrations by Pam Smy and a new preface by the author. A fresh, clean, crisp copy (no fading, no inscriptions, no blemishes, tight binding) in a clean and unfaded slipcase. A handsome copy.
The Dark Is Rising is a 1973 children's fantasy novel by Susan Cooper. The second in The Dark Is Rising Sequence, the book won a Newbery Honor. It has been described as a "folkloric tale of an English boy caught in a battle between light and dark"
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase is a children's novel by Joan Aiken, first published in 1962.[1] Set in an alternative history of England, it tells of the adventures of cousins Bonnie and Sylvia and their friend Simon the goose-boy as they thwart the evil schemes of their governess, Miss Slighcarp, and their so-called "teacher" at boarding school, Mrs. Brisket.
The novel is the first in the Wolves Chronicles, a series of books set during the fictional early 19th-century reign of King James the Third. Many wolves have migrated from the bitter cold of Europe and Russia into Britain via a new "channel tunnel” and terrorise the inhabitants of rural areas. It is described by John Rowe Townsend as "a tale of double-dyed villainy, with right triumphant in the end".
Who can resist The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at this time of year? ‘Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that savage face which broke upon us out of the fog’. The Hound of Baskervilles is one of the best of all crime novels and is beautifully reproduced in this Folio edition. Its combination of horror, homicidal villainy, the fogs of remote Dartmoor, the Baskerville Curse ‘a great black beast shaped like a hound’, are unforgettable and Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are at their best!
The Folio edition of Orwell’s classic Animal Farm is wonderfully illustrated with Quentin Blake’s drawings. Although it is not a typical Halloween tale, its dystopian atmosphere is a chilling ‘fairy story’; a timeless and devastating satire of idealism betrayed by power and corruption. When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another; a dystopian future of a society bereft of reason.
Whilst our skies darken and the clocks change:
The leaves fall thick
The veil grows thin
Its time for a new cycle to begin…
