This ghostly tale places the emphasis on humour rather than horror It features a host of gothic elements including an historic house Ghastly-Gorm Hall which has a broken wing as well as west and east wings and is complete with a ghostly white nun, a black monk and a beige curate, in addition to a range of other apparitions. Ada has a strained relationship with her father Lord Goth but she is no swooning, screaming heroine. This plucky girl teams up with two visiting children and a ghost mouse (‘Call me Ishmael’), whose own memoirs can be found tucked into a pocket at the back of the book, and together they defeat the plans of the dastardly indoor gamekeeper, Maltravers. This book can be thoroughly mined for its wealth of literary references such as governesses rejoicing in names like Hebe Poppins and Becky Blunt, a Secret Garden and an Even-More-Secret-Garden in the hall’s grounds, not to mention a lady novelist called Mary Shellfish and a surely self referential Martin Puzzlewit, the radical cartoonist. Chris Riddell has drawn his characters in loving detail and they appear in profusion throughout this book which is a beautiful and desirable object, with its pages edged in purple and endpapers decorated with silver skulls.
