INKY SQUIGGLES

Cold Bath Street by A.J. Hartley  (with illustrations by Janet Pickering ) , £7.99 (UCLan Publishing, 9780995515574) Publication date: 27 February 2018 My rating:   ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ Despite appearances, most ghost stories focus on the living and the impact the dead have on them. By the beginning of Cold Bath Street , however, protagonist Preston Oldcorn has already died, his heart and watch stopped forever at 9:22p.m. Part supernatural thriller, part mystery, Cold Bath Street is pacey and engaging, drawing the reader in with an unpredictable plot and warmly drawn characters. Hartley casts Preston as a relatable young boy who, like many of us, wishes he'd spoken up for himself more often. Unfortunately, it takes his untimely death to jolt him with this realisation. The extraordinary circumstances in which he finds himself see him face many of the usual worries and desires of a teenager alongside the dawning realisation that he will never again get to act on any of them. Some...

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. 'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, 'tapping at my chamber door — Only this, and nothing more.' – 'The Raven', Edgar Allen Poe After spending several years of my early childhood sharing a bedroom with two brothers, coming into a bedroom all of my own was a momentous event. It might have been little more than a glorified closet with hot-pink pebbledash walls (a misguided effort by my parents to designate it the 'girl's' room), but for the first time I had my own space. I filled the little shelves in my space-saving cabin bed with Choose Your Own Adventure and Goosebumps books carefully curated from local charity shops and hunkered in the cubby hole under my desk with friends conspiratorially as though it were a secret hideout. Apparently drunk on the sudden power of establishing my tiny empire, on my first day in residence, ...