Monsters Come Out Tonight! Halloween ha’s for ages 3-8

Something odd happens in the beginning of October. Small children start to scare themselves on purpose. The older ones pretend to be scary clowns from movies that older kids say are scary, but are really quite horrible. While those middle school kids and upper elementary school ones are doing that, their younger siblings are curious about the classic monsters. Monsters Come Out Tonight! by Frederick Glasser, with illustrations by Edward Miller, is a Halloween lift-the-flap book that will provide the ‘fun’ scares pre-k kids want and need.

For example, I thought our eight year-old would be too ‘mature’ for this book. The text is the perfect reading level for him, but the jokey, softly drawn monsters aren’t scary enough for him, I thought. It turns out that this book was reading comfort food to an emerging reader. This, the same kid who was running around the house screaming “I AM PENNYWISE!” and then ran away yelling when I offered to actually show him the trailer. *

Monsters Come Out Tonight! is the book that those kids three through seven will enjoy. The pages are thick cardboard stock, but not as thick as board books, which will allow kids to realize that this is most certainly not a baby book.

On each two-fold spread there’s a human in a costume who’s reaching for something like a door handle or book. When the reader opens that flap they’ll be greeted by a couple of real monsters who are exactly what the human child was emulating. Parents will appreciate that the doors that open the lift-the-flap aspects are solidly built. These flaps won’t withstand the wrath of a teething, unsupervised toddler for long. However, the part that opens up was much stronger and thicker than I thought it would be.

There is also a nice rhyming stanza on the opposite page. Just be sure to read the book far enough ahead of bedtime, you know how kids are at this stage.  

Young kids want to be scared a little bit and the monster ball that happens on the final four pages of the books is just the sort of happy, madcap fun that they’ll laugh out loud to. They’ll point to the real Dracula, then the kid Dracula and say out loud “that one’s not real, he’s just a kid”. You’ll grin and wish that your kid could be this age for just a little bit longer.

For pre-k through mid-elementary school kids Monsters Come Out Tonight! is just the sort of durable, quick book they’re looking for to get them primed for Halloween. 

*For the record, I wouldn’t have shown him the trailer. I also explained to him the ins and outs of marketing and how sometimes movies that advertises too much do so because they’re actually bad movies. We also banned him from running around our house yelling I AM PENNYWISE and asked him to go to the neighbors to play for a while.