Aunt Morbelia and the Screaming Skulls by Joan Carris, 1990.

Todd Fearing is worried because his Great-Aunt Morbelia is coming to live with his family.  He has never met her before, but he has heard that she is rather strange, and he knows that his life will never be the same again.  Aunt Morbelia is very superstitious, and she sees bad omens everywhere.  When she first arrives at Todd’s house and sees that the family owns both a black dog and a black cat, she takes it as a sign that she should leave right away.  It takes a lot persuading to get her to stay on a trial basis.  By Joan Carris.

Having Aunt Morbelia at his house is sort of a mixed blessing.  On one hand, Aunt Morbelia likes baking good things for him to eat and helps him with his homework.  Todd is dyslexic and has extra assignments to help him improve his reading.  Aunt Morbelia used to be a teacher, and Todd really appreciates the help she gives him. On the other hand, Todd doesn’t like scary stories, and Aunt Morbelia’s talk of ghosts and bad omens gives him nightmares.  His friends like to hear her stories, particularly Rocky, a girl who typically doesn’t like feminine things.  Rocky, whose real name is RosaLynn, constantly pesters him about when Aunt Morbelia will tell more stories. 

Eventually, Todd gets tired of Rocky’s obsession with ghost stories and the way she encourages Aunt Morbelia to keep telling them, and he and his best friend, Jeff, decide to play a trick on her to cure her appetite for scary stuff.  However, their trick backfires, and in their attempt to make it up to everyone, especially Aunt Morbelia, they end up making things worse. 

Todd and Jeff succeed in scaring Rocky by dressing up as ghosts and showing up at her house in the middle of the night. They have so much fun with their trick that they decide to go to their friend Alan’s house to try it on him. Alan lives in the house right behind Todd’s, and that’s where they run into trouble. When they start their ghost act, they can’t get Alan to wake up and come to the window to see them. Jeff decides to throw a rock at Alan’s window to wake him up, but the rock breaks the window. To make matters worse, they startle Todd’s black cat, causing the cat to yowl. The boys run back to Jeff’s house, but Jeff’s father catches them. Todd has to go home and apologize to Aunt Morbelia, who was frightened very badly when the cat started howling.

The boys decide to take Aunt Morbelia on a tour of the historic places in town to make up for scaring her. Unfortunately, Jeff includes the funeral home that his father runs on the tour because it is in one of the oldest buildings in town. Although Todd tells her that she doesn’t have to go in if she doesn’t want to, Aunt Morbelia thinks that it would be rude to refuse. Unfortunately, Jeff’s father arrives with a dead body before their tour ends, and Aunt Morbelia faints when she sees it. Aunt Morbelia tells the boys that it isn’t their fault, but she says that she’s not sure she really belongs in their town. Even with all of Aunt Morbelia’s superstition craziness and spooky stories, Todd still doesn’t want her to leave.  Is there still something he can do to convince her to stay?

The book is currently available online through Internet Archive. There is also a sequel to this book, Beware the Ravens, Aunt Morbelia!

My Reaction and Spoilers

When I first read this book, I was expecting a spooky mystery, but it’s really more about a boy adjusting to a relative coming to live with his family and dealing with his dyslexia. Although Todd initially has some reservations about Aunt Morbelia living with him and his parents and her spooky stories scare him, Todd and Aunt Morbelia gradually come to understand each other better, and Todd genuinely wants her to stay. To help Aunt Morbelia change her mind about leaving, Todd has all the people who have met Aunt Morbelia since she arrived come by the house and tell her how much they all want her to stay.  After everyone has visited her, Todd himself tells her that he doesn’t want her to go.  They talk about the scary stories and how Todd feels about them, and Aunt Morbelia tells Todd that if he doesn’t want to hear a scary story, he can be honest with her and tell her so.  Now that the two of them understand each other better, Aunt Morbelia agrees to stay, and she accepts the invitation that one of Todd’s teachers makes to help tutor children at the learning center.

I didn’t like the part where the boys played the trick on Rocky and how awkward things were with her afterward. Jeff’s father says that part of that, with Rocky drifting away from her friendship with the boys, is because the kids are growing up. He says that, as they grow up, girls start changing before boys do and have different interests from boys and different ways of looking at things, including more tomboy girls, like Rocky. Toward the end of the story, Rocky does appear to need more friendships with other girls, and Todd decides that Jeff’s dad is probably right, that Rocky thinks and acts differently from his guy friends because she’s a girl, even if she’s usually not a particularly “girly” girl. Part of that may be true, but the boys’ trick was pretty mean. I think that the real issue is that real friends shouldn’t do that to each other, and Rocky might really be questioning what she’s looking for in a real friend. Although, to hear some of my male friends talk about their youths, boys (at least certain ones) might be more accepting and forgiving of that kind of rough humor from friends than girls would be, so perhaps boys vs. girls issues are partly at the heart of it.

I thought that the parts where Aunt Morbelia was helping Todd with his dyslexia were interesting. I don’t really have any experience with the condition myself, and I’m not quite sure what techniques teachers really use to help dyslexics. One of the tricks that Aunt Morbelia uses is to break down tasks into smaller pieces to make them more manageable. For example, Todd feels badly that he can’t keep the orders of months straight. When he tries to recite the months of the year in order, he mixes them up, which makes him feel bad because most kids his age should be able to do this easily. When I first read this, I wasn’t sure if this is a common issue among dyslexics, although I thought that I remembered reading something about dyslexics having trouble remembering the orders of certain things, like lists of instructions. I looked it up, and apparently, it is a common issue, along with memorizing things like days of the week. There are different techniques for handling it, some of which involve associating the things to be remembered with something else that sticks in the mind more easily, such as a rhyme or song. Aunt Morbelia does some association with Todd but she also breaks the months down into groups of three, representing the four seasons of the year, and giving him small bits of information to memorize. She calls the spring months, “the flower months” and the fall months “the leaf months” and so on. Todd finds that technique helpful, and Aunt Morbelia says that once Todd has mastered the seasons of the year, they will put the season of the year together so that he can recite the entire year. Todd also describes other ways that he is affected by his dyslexia and techniques that his teacher uses to help him.