Things that Go Bump in the Day
"The joke of daily things being scary to vampires is the clever core of the story."
Instead of a child being afraid of strange noises at night, Melinda Beatty shows us how scary daytime noises can be—if you're a vampire. Young readers will recognize the sounds little Vlad is startled by as the mail carrier, a fire engine, and a lawnmower. Mama Vampire reassures her little one not by telling the truth, however. It seems the real things would be too frightening, so instead she invents stories around each sound:
"My dogged little devil, those sounds you hear are just Hortense the hairy Horllinger, who lives in the neighbor's shed! Both of her heads have a nasty cold and she has to cough and clear her throat."
Human readers may laugh at the twisted explanations, each monstrous in a silly way, and be reassured themselves at the ordinary origin of each disturbing noise. In the end, Vlad accepts that "There's nothing. At all. To fear." He snuggles down with his monster friends in his cozy coffin. Mama Vampire, however, turns out to be worried herself. The book closes on a confusing note as Mama says, "My little vampire has such an imagination!," suggesting that Vlad didn't hear anything that was really happening after all.
A new noise, "Ting-a-ling," keeps Mama awake, something she clearly does hear. A page turn reveals the source of this new scary sound, an ice cream truck, as Mama lays awake, looking terrified. So Did Vlad have a big imagination or did Mama, with all her clever explanations covering up the real reasons for the noises? Was Mama as frightened as Vlad all along and trying to reassure both of them with her lies?
The joke of daily things being scary to vampires is the clever core of the story, but it wavers in how this is carried out. Mama lying to Vlad isn't ultimately reassuring. And the last page of her looking scared stiff herself doesn't encourage peaceful dreams for anyone.
The illustrations are simplistic and flat, though fun details like ghosts and monsters are playfully added. Things a human child would recoil from are daily life for Vlad, after all. But the daylight world and the night world all have the same visual tones and hues, no atmospheric differences at all. These aren't pages that invite long looking. Rather, they encourage quick flipping through in hopes there will be a restful page at last, something a goodnight book should end with, rather than a tense nightmare, funny though the bad dream may be to a human child.