Creepy Crayon! [Creepy Tales!]
by Aaron Reynolds; illus. by Peter Brown
Primary    Simon    48 pp.    g
8/22    978-1-5344-6588-6    $18.99
e-book ed.  978-1-5344-6589-3    $10.99

Reynolds and Brown (Creepy Carrots!; Creepy Pair of Underwear!, rev. 9/17) are back to haunt another innocuous item: your crayons! Jasper Rabbit could use some help with his schoolwork, and he gets it from a purple crayon with an expressively drawn cartoon face. That at-first-friendly visage eventually shows its sinister true colors as the crayon goes from helpful (magically improving Jasper’s spelling) to downright possessive (scrawling “YOU NEED ME” on a mirror). Purple pops as the only color besides the noirish black-and-white of the illustrations (other than cameos by green underwear and orange carrots). Harold and the Purple Crayon meets Faust, and the imaginative, humorously written result is so ridiculous that it’s hard to stay really scared.

From the September/October 2022 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.