Interest Age 14+ Reading Age 8+. Perfect to enjoy around Halloween, in fact at any time when you want to read something more than a bit scary. Harley loses his little brother and sister out trick or treating, but when he finds them they are somehow different and quite frightening. So much for Halloween being a bit of fun.
For Harley, Halloween is all about trying to pull Una at the disco. He doesn't believe his teacher's warning that it's the night spirits and dark forces wreak havoc. He definitely doesn't want to go trick or treating with his brother and sister. But when he finds them after they've wandered off he realieses that his teacher's warning was right: Halloween is anything but ‘just a bit of fun'. Chilling Halloween tale.
Robert E. "Bob" Swindells (born 20 March 1939) is an author of children's and young adult literature. Born in Bradford, the first of five children, Swindells worked for a local newspaper after leaving school aged 15. He served with the Royal Air Force and held various jobs before training as a teacher. His first novel, When Darkness Comes (1973), was written as his thesis while in training. Swindells combined writing with teaching until 1980 when he took up writing full-time. He first won the Children's Book Award with Brother in the Land (1985), a novel set in a post-apocalyptic world. Swindells was a supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and is quoted as saying that the work "... came out of my own anger and frustration ... you can't kill selectively with nuclear weapons, you wipe out millions of people ..." Swindells also won the award for Room 13 (1990), Nightmare Stairs (Short novel, 1998) and Blitzed (Younger readers, 2003). His young adult novel Stone Cold (1993), which dealt with homelessness, won the Carnegie Medal in 1994. Swindells is married, lives in Yorkshire and has two daughters and three grandchildren.
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