Patrick Ness: A Monster Calls.

Conceived by Siobhan Dowd before her cancer took her, and reimagined by Patrick Ness four years later, 'A Monster Calls' is a children's novel of the indelible sort. The story begins  just after midnight. Conor O'Malley, a thirteen year old insomniac, is already awake, reliving the nightmare, "the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming." He hears a voice, a monstrous, untamed, wild sort of voice. He hears a billowing wind and groaning floorboards. Through his window he sees a graveyard, a church tower, and the steel lines of a railway track glowing in the moonlight. From the centre of the graveyard there rises an old yew tree, its branches twisting and creaking, forming a terrible face, a colossal spine and torso, a moving, breathing skin of woven needle-like leaves.

These opening pages are foreboding. Children's stories do not usually begin quite like this. There is an uneasy restlessness behind the words, and the same restlessness twitches at the margins too. Here, in the white spaces, Jim Kay's distressed inky doodles scratch, sprawl and smudge the edges of the pages, closing in on the text as Conor's nightmare closes in on him. Kay's obsessive monochrome details border the story throughout, sometimes bursting into beautiful full page or double page illustrations. They are midnight landscapes, bristling, sinewy and moonlit. They are of the same material as the text, inseparable from it in any meaningful sense.

Setting its black knotted hands on either side of the bedroom window, the monster glares in at a sleepless Conor. It roars and screams and pounds its fists against the house. It smashes a fist through the window, shattering glass and wood and brick across the floor, filling the room with its warm breath and its angry bellows. The white space of the page collapses into shadows and splinters.

"Shout all you want," Conor says, "I've seen worse."

In the author's note to the book Ness confesses to only one self-imposed guideline: "to write a book I think Siobhan would have liked." This seems like a sensible way to have gone about things. Ness and Dowd never met. He was handed her beginning, premise and characters by her publishers, Walker Books, and asked to, or felt like he had been asked to, in his words, "Go. Run with it. Make trouble." And that's what he has done.

Ness tells a story about stories, and not one of them, the frame story or the others, is ordinary or familiar. Each one troubles. Each one runs into the other. Each is a kind of inverted fairy-tale, populated with the familiar stock-characters, but without the stock morality. In one, for instance, we follow a noble Prince and a beautiful Princess into exile, fleeing hand in hand from an evil Queen, and from a kingdom rightfully theirs. They stop one night in a wood and rest beneath a tree. In the morning the Prince is distraught to find his love dead by his side, murdered in her sleep. Heart-broken and vengeful, he returns to the kingdom with the Princess' body, raises an army and overthrows the wicked Queen. In the name of his love he liberates the people of the kingdom from the Queen's despotic rule, and so, it seems, all is well. But then the monster, as the book's omniscient, omnipresent story-teller, takes us back to the dark of the night beneath the tree, and from the darkness he teases a different story, one which disfigures, or exposes the first. And this is what Ness does too. He teases out unseen, unfamiliar strands of stories from the dark, shadowy parts of the seen, familiar ones, and so the stories and their meanings become relative, shifting and contorting to accommodate the shifts and contortions of their neighbours. Each story is also, in and of itself, a commentary on the act of story-telling, challenging and toying with our intuitive responses to seemingly familiar stories.

'A Monster Calls' might have been another didactic children's book, a poe-faced message with a story attached as an afterthought. But instead it is a fully-formed, evolving story, a thing born of a dying breath with its own breathing musculature, and its own hulking shadow. It broods and bruises like Ted Hughes' Iron Man. It is beautiful and dark, restless but unwavering.