'When Maya and her classmates are asked to write a creepy story with a winter theme, they come up with some brilliant ideas. Rising floodwaters uncover long-buried bodies and ghostly children take to the ice on a frozen canal. But as each of the stories is read out in class, Maya grows more and more uncomfortable. She features in each of her friends' creepy tales and they start to feel a little too real. Finally, when a mysterious new girl stands up to read the last story of the day, the light outside dims and it starts to snow. The classroom starts to freeze but everyone is trapped. Can Maya stop the story before the nightmare comes true?'
I think it's fair to say that people like being scared, a good creepy tale that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, that has you pulling your limbs in close and tucking your blanket in tighter are just good fun; and this is true for kids too. Kids love to get scared every now and then.
Horror stories marketed towards kids can be a tricky thing. There's a fine line that you need to walk. You need to make sure that the book is scary enough that that it'll get the reader frightened, but not too scary that it'll result in nightmares and parents writing angry letters. It can also be hard to make scary stories that will also appeal to adults. Looking back on some of the 'greatest' kids horror fiction as an adult, things like Goosebumps, it's sometimes hard to see what about them actually made you afraid as a kid. Freeze, however, does something really special, as it managed to creep me out a lot.
The story follows Maya, a young girl who wakes up one day feeling a bit odd. She's not sure what's wrong with her, she knows that she had some kind of bad dream, but can't really remember much about it. This feeling of unease continues as she heads to school. Arriving at school she finds that her friends all seem to have had a similar experience.
A supply teacher is taking the class for the day, and gets the students to try and come up with creepy stories themed around winter. Maya's friends all come up with scary stories, and one by one they stand in front of the class and read them out. As each story gets told Maya's bad feeling gets worse and worse, and she feels like she's experiencing the stories herself. When a new girl in the class, an oddly pale girl none of them have ever seen before, takes her turn to read out a story Maya realises that something terrible is happening.
Freeze does a really clever thing, it's one big story, but really it's an anthology book, a book that has several spooky short stories within it, but one with a bridging narrative around it all that these stories play a part in. We don't just get the spooky stories that the kids are coming up with, but the narrative around them adds to the unease too; especially as the stories begin to bleed into the main narrative and make things creepier for our characters.
Priestley does an excellent job with each of these winter themed horror stories, and they're all genuinely quite creepy. They're simple yes, and they do feel like they could have been written by children, but he seems able to tap into some kind of primal child-like fear with each one that makes it feel genuinely terrifying at times. These feelings are only enhanced by the dark and disturbing illustrations throughout the book; also provided by Priestley.
There have been occasions when reading Barrington Stoke books where I've felt that the lack of colour illustrations has been a little bit of a let down, where I wanted to see the colour versions to get the full effect of the work the artists had put in. In this book, however, the exact opposite is true. The gloomy, black and white illustrations only enhance the creepiness of things. The jagged, sometimes messy art style that Priestly employs makes the illustrations feel like partially glimpsed and barely remembered moments from a nightmare, where things don't feel completely right.
Freeze is a children's book, but I think it's one that readers of any age can pick up an enjoy. Whether you're reading it to a child, trying not to get them too scared, or if you've just picked it up yourself to see what it's like I'm pretty sure that you're going to like it. And that ending, I have to be honest, it's a bold and striking end to a kids book.
A must for any kid who has a thing for horror; and any adult who feels the same.
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