A Spooky Adventure Isn't So Scary After All

The Pixar movie Monsters, Inc. is all about monsters who come into the bedrooms of little children at night, initially to scare them. In the level two Step Into Reading book A Spooky Adventure, fears of such monsters and other spookables have another group of Pixar characters all riled up.

Written by Apple Jordan and illustrated by Alan Batson and Lori Tyminski, A Spooky Adventure is set after Toy Story 3, so it includes not only cowboy Woody, space ranger Buzz and several other members of the classic Toy Story gang - namely, neurotic dino Rex, the Potatoheads, loyal Bullseye and Slinky Dog, vivacious Jessie and practical piggybank Hamm - it also features triceratops Trixie, unicorn Buttercup, hedgehog Mr. Pricklepants and clown Chuckles, their new friends from Bonnie's room.

These new friends are very important in this story because, having lived with sweet, energetic Bonnie much longer, they know how things work around her house. Bonnie's vivid imagination leads her to make up the game Haunted Bakery, where prop ghosts figure prominently, and this gives most of the new recruits a case of the willies. They begin to see sinister beings lurking everywhere, especially when they are left alone on a rainy night, and it's up to these longtime residents to reveal the man behind the curtain, whether it's a pair of bunny slippers they mistake for a monster or a mop that resembles a dragon.

This is a story that could help comfort a child feeling anxious about strange noises or shapes that surface at night. Jordan strikes a good balance here, showing that spookiness of the variety that Bonnie introduces can be fun but urging kids not to let their imaginations run wild at nighttime if the result is anxiety and sleeplessness. It's a Scooby Doo kind of ending, but without anyone being villainous. All we have here are simple misunderstandings.

The pictures are a lot of fun to peruse here. Retaining the computer-animated look of the movies, unlike some tie-in books that recreate the characters in a flat, retro style, it feels like it could be an animated short. Granted, it lacks the rapid-fire banter and sight gags of those shorts, but for the format, it's still a funny read, and the pictures are great fun, with the dark shading making it all feel just a bit scary. While that makes it an especially appropriate choice for October, this is really an any-time-of-year book.

The wording in the story is simple without being particularly repetitive, though it does follow a basic formula throughout most of the book. One member of Woody's gang identifies something scary, and one of Bonnie's toys reveals that it actually is something completely innocuous. There's always a picture that gives us the toys' perception first, so kids can have fun guessing what the object might actually be, which makes the book more interactive.

It seems likely that the Toy Story franchise won't include any more feature films, but I'm glad to see that there is a place for new mini-adventures with these wonderful characters, especially when they are done as well as this book is.