The Wolves in the Walls

This large square picture book for older readers is preoccupied, as is Gaiman’s novel, Coraline, with the meaning of the house in which the heroine lives with her family. Coraline explores a parallel house with counterfeit parents who have button eyes and whose secret agenda appears to be to control and drain her of life. In The Wolves in the Walls, Lucy’s pig-puppet is the only one who listens to her. Her distant and preoccupied mother busy making jam and her sceptical father and brother will not heed her warnings that there are wolves in the walls until the creatures burst out and the family is forced to flee in terror. The house is taken over by the wolves who wear the family’s clothes (cutting holes in trousers for their tails), turn the TV up very loud, eat toast and jam and generally trash the place with their partying. This time Lucy ignores her defeatist parents and takes the initiative, first rescuing pink-pig and then seeing the wolves off. A metaphor, perhaps, for the necessity of walls in the internal world against intrusion, this scary and wittily dramatic picture book will have readers of all ages on the edge of their seat. McKean heightens the drama with the contrast between his fluid, scratchy pen renderings of the wolves and the moulded, rather sculptural faces of Lucy and her family. Collage, occasional picture sequences and an expressive use of different typefaces and fonts lend tension as events take new turns. A tour de force that will be enjoyed by both young readers and adults.