Books with title The Midnight Feast

When Nine year old Tyler Dumont is suddenly forced to move cross country with his parents, from sunny Arizona to a small town in rural Massachusetts, he isn't sure what to expect. But, once settled into their new home with it's creaking floor boards and the dark, twisted tree in the middle of the front yard, Tyler begins to see and hear things that he can't explain, and soon learns that there is a lot more to the old gray house than he ever expected. Suddenly, Tyler finds himself in the middle of a hundred year old mystery, his only friend the ghost of an eight year old girl. He has to do whatever he can to find the key and save his family - and himself - before something truly terrible happens to them all.

With poetic language, Doherty creates an enigmatic bedtime fantasy. Every night a boy and his dog awaken to see the midnight man who "comes riding through the town on his midnight horse with it's hushing hooves." The two follow the stranger through the streets of town to the moors, "the end of the world," where the man rides off and leaves them sleeping on the ground. Next, the moon ""peers at them and cries,"" then returns them to the bedroom where the story began. There boy and dog awaken once again, thinking they see the "winking moon" and hear the ""midnight horse"" before falling back to sleep until morning. Lovely as many of Doherty's metaphors are, they leave lingering questions. Readers never know if the midnight visitor is good or evil; seductive though he is, he abandons the child and dog on the moor. The moon's tears also suggest the pair is in danger. Yet Andrews's colored-pencil illustrations depict a velvety world in which the child and dog seem safe--until they reach the vast moors at the edge of the world. The artist portrays just a hint of facial features on the ghostly midnight man, and creates no relationship between the nightly apparition and his followers. Unlike the Sandman, the eerie midnight man may well keep readers up at night.