Oh, did I mention there’s a hapless wizard whose trademark is a rat that lives in his hair and the accidentally-discovered potion that transforms rats into humans—like its literary predecessor in Jekyll and Hyde—sometimes cannot be controlled? Typhus: “He’d felt fear many times. It was part of being a rat. But this nameless dread, this trembling unease he’d felt ever since becoming human, he’d thought there was no word for it. But then the word for it had just popped right into his head. Evil.”

However, it is not the rat but Charles and his nightly-tale equivalent, Prince Cha Cha, who are somehow attracted to and deadened by evil. The real boy is suffering from depression and his slightly-older sister, Tanya, is not expected to live much longer. There is a haunting, recurring scene of this young girl sitting alone on the edge of her bed in the dark holding a steak knife with which to prick her palm should she start to fall asleep, the knocking and scratching of some unseen terror coming from within her closet. There is not a misstep in this excellent book. It expertly serves up a startling surprise about the real identity of Griselle, the court advisor, and the horrific, unsettling anti-climax will make you as eager as I am for the second book of this projected trilogy.

The problem with the classics is that movies have given us a definitive visual interpretation. The joy of this book is that those images, whether dark or fanciful, have full play in the theater of our imaginations. Listen to this premonition-dream Charles has early in the novel: “He looked at his sister who stared into his eyes. Then she turned and pointed at her kite. It now seemed impossibly small, just the tiniest white dot against the blue. Then Charles saw that she was letting the last of the kite string slip through her fingers.”