‘Disturbed, creeped out, puzzled and uncomfortable’…by a Jan Pieńkowski pop-up book?

Haunted House by Jan Pieńkowski terrified the author AF Harrold as a child, He relives the horror here

I want to talk about a book I hated as a child: Jan Pieńkowski’s Greenaway medal-winning pop-up book Haunted House. (With Jane Walmsley as assistant illustrator and Tor Lokvig’s paper engineering. It’s important to give credit where it’s due.)

The book was published in 1979, when I was four years old. The copy I’ve got on my desk as I write this is the one I had back then. It’s grown tatty. Some of the pop-up elements have dried up un-sticky sticky tape no longer holding them in place. Some of the tabs, when pulled, make nothing move. Clearly the book was read, and read a lot.

Before my mum died I talked to her about it. I have the clearest memory of pleading with her to not have to read this book. It utterly terrified me. She, on the other hand, remembered it slightly differently. She understood my pleading to be a sort of pretend fear, or a I’m scared but secretly I like it fear. It was nothing of the sort.

For those who don’t know the book it’s just six double page spreads of six different rooms in the eponymous Haunted House.

The front cover is the front door. A note says “Let yourself in”. We go in. In the hallway an unidentified voice says, “Come in, Doctor”. (I was four years old. I wasn’t a doctor. Who was the voice in the book talking to? Immediately there was someone looking over my shoulder as I look at the pictures.)

There is slime on the stairs. The eyes in the portrait on the wall move. There’s a dedication from the author that says, “For Malcolm”. Who’s Malcolm?

The next room is the kitchen. A rather kindly looking octopus is doing the washing up. Fine. But there’s a cake in the oven. A birthday cake. And all the candles are lit. In the oven. Who lights candles on a cake in the oven? This didn’t make sense to four-year-old me. Never mind the monster on top of the oven whose mouth groans as the pages open and close and the card grinds across itself. Candles. In an oven?

In the sitting room there’s a gorilla in an armchair. The voice at the bottom of the page says, “I can’t seem to settle down”. Are we in the gorilla’s house? There’s a cat sat staring into the fireplace. It pops out on a 3D grate, but when you pull the card to look at the front of the cat (which, I guess, you’re not supposed to do), Pieńkowski’s used the same drawing as on the other side – this cat has two backs, no front: has no face. That’s scary.

When we were in the kitchen it was daytime, bright blue afternoon sky outside the window. By the time we reach the bathroom, and the aliens I’ve not mentioned yet have burst through the wall, it’s night time. Why have we spent so long here? Why didn’t we just turn around and leave. (I wanted to. Just shut the book. But mum must’ve turned the page again.)

Up in the bedroom a real ghost (one of the few actual “haunted” bits of the haunted house) appears from nowhere hovering over the bed. I think this was the cause of so many night terrors, of waking in the dark, or waiting to go to sleep and being frozen with fear, knowing if I opened my eyes something was hovering above the bed. I hated this book.

And then that final spread, up in the attic, with the sound of the saw cutting back and forth inside the wooden packing crate. The fat cat licking its lips as if it’s eaten something. The perfectly ordinary attic junk and jumble. The final words. “DOCTOR, WHERE ARE YOU…?” (One of my favourite punctuational moves, by the way, the dangling query.)

I hated this book. It gave me sleepless nights. It made me think my mother was wilfully torturing me (while she thought we were having fun). Even now, looking at it for this article, I feel disturbed, creeped out, puzzled and uncomfortable.

But for some reason I have kept it. I have kept that book I was given well over 30 years ago. It has come with me into my grown up life. I have never forgotten it. I’ve never understood it, but I’ve never forgotten it.

Maybe my mum was right.

AF Harrold is the author of the Fizzlebert Stump series of novels, the poetry collection Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard, illustrated by Chris Riddell, and The Imaginary, illustrated by Emily Gravett. Find out more on his website.

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