(++++) JOY UNSPOOKEN

The Haunted Playground. Words by R.J. Palacio. Pictures by Brett Helquist. Random House. $19.99. 

     A wonderful concept that is delightfully illustrated but slightly marred by some inelegance in the storytelling, The Haunted Playground is a Halloween-themed book worthy of being read not only in the season for which it is intended but also at any other time when kids may feel a bit of a chill and need a touch of enjoyment and reassurance. R.J. Palacio’s foundational idea is packed with potential: what if scary ghosts need respite now and then from being frightening, and need to let their hair down (so to speak) and just have fun? And when better to do that at Halloween – at an ordinary children’s playground turned extraordinary through a powerful spell cast by Rex Magnificus, the king of all ghosts? 

     Brett Helquist does an exceptional job with this concept: the early pages of the book show the translucent grayish ghosts emerging from graves and haunted houses, gathering from all directions, wearing expressions of sadness mixed with scariness, drifting along through a night sky and nighttime scenes that verge on the monochromatic. The only hints of color come from strictly human artifacts – headstones, a house far below – until the ghost brigade gathers above a playground (seen from high above, as if from a drone’s viewpoint), then descends to ground level. And now the ghosts start to smile, donning discarded children’s Halloween costumes and beginning to play with abandon on the kids’ slides, swings, carousel and more. It is a wonderful transformation – but Rex Magnificus stands apart from it all, scowling as he supervises the activities. 

     And then two living kids show up: Joe and Lulu live in a house near the playground and have been awakened by the ghosts’ merrymaking. Their brightly colored pajamas make them fit right in with the colorful costumes the wan ghosts are wearing – but Rex Magnificus will not put up with living children amid his subjects, and in a superlative two-page illustration inflates himself to giant size (taking up almost the entire two facing pages), looming over the youngsters with his empty eye sockets, skeletal hands and frowning mouth: “‘HEY, YOU TWO!’ I fiercely howl / to scare them to the bone. / ‘Leave here NOW! YOU CANNOT STAY! / AWAY!’ I loudly moan.” But the kids are thoroughly unimpressed with Rex Magnificus and with the signs posted at the playground warning that the area is currently closed to children. The kids insist on playing in the playground – and much to Rex Magnificus’ discomfiture, his ghosts join in and everyone plays together, as Helquist shows in a truly wonderful mid-book foldout that spreads his art across the equivalent of three pages of fun and bizarrerie. 

     Eventually, even Rex Magnificus joins in the merriment: “It’s kind of nice for me to take / a break from being frightful.” But when dawn approaches and the party must end, and Joe and Lulu insist they want to go with the ghosts to wherever the ghosts are going, Rex Magnificus kindly but firmly draws the line – promising, however, that at next Halloween, the spirits will return and will be prepared to welcome these particular kids to their get-together. Until then, Rex Magnificus warns readers that he will be “truly petrifying” and that if you cross his path, “I’ll scare you till you’re green.” 

     Carried along by the excellence of the illustrations, the fable is a wonderful one from start to finish. It is unfortunately marred a bit by Palacio’s inattentive writing and her failure, or that of her editor, to catch and correct a number of errors. Twice she refers to “Hallow’s Eve” instead of the correct “Hallows’ Eve.” She writes that “us ghosts are meant to do” scary things instead of “we ghosts.” She opens the tale by saying the ghosts “leave the graveyards where they lay” when she means “where they lie.” She says the ghosts “skip and dance together, / like they did when they were young,” instead of the correct “as they did when they were young.” And she repeatedly loses track of the rhythm and syllabification of the verse in which she is writing, thus making the story more cumbersome and stumbling than it ought to be. One example among quite a few: “I cast the spell that brings to life / this playground of the night. / Here my phantoms come – / but not to spook or fright.” The frustrating thing is how easily the writing could have been better, not only for spelling and grammatical accuracy but also for its cadence: “Here my phantoms come to play – / and not to spook or fright” would have done it. Palacio is an experienced author who can do better than this, and has in her other books, so there is no obvious reason for things falling short stylistically in The Haunted Playground. Despite this issue, though, Palacio’s underlying concept is so appealing, and Helquist’s illustrations so excellent, that the book easily overcomes its author’s self-induced sloppiness and emerges as a genuinely clever take on the imaginative possibilities of Halloween – that is, All Hallows’ Eve.