I saved up my copy of Tales of Terror From The Tunnel’s Mouth for a long, time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read the stories, but I didn’t want them to be over. And I knew that this was the final part, the third book, of a wonderful trilogy.

In the end though I couldn’t resist. And when I picked the book up I read and I read.

I read the story of Robert, a child in Edwardian England, travelling back to school on his own for the very first time.

At first Robert was alone in a compartment. But as the train made stops others joined him. A number of men. And one woman. A pale young woman dressed in pure white ….

The train came to a halt by the mouth of a tunnel. The delay seemed unending. Robert noticed that many of his fellow travellers had fallen asleep, and that only he and the woman in white were awake.

She noticed too. And she began to tell him stories. She was a wonderful storyteller.

She told him stories of children she had known, and of things that had happened to them. Her stories started quietly, but as she spoke the sense of foreboding grew. And each story would end with a strange and unexpected twist. There would not be any happy endings.

The story of a governess struggling with a problem child who will lead her, and those around her, to question her sanity. A boy whose resentment of his father’s other interests leads him into terrible danger. A girl who is fascinated by a puppet theatre that is not at all what it seems. And, maybe the strangest tale of the whole trilogy, the story of a crack in a wall …

There are wonderful echoes of other stories in these tales.

Tales that are of their time, and yet utterly timeless.

It would be quite impossible for anyone, child or adult, not to be entranced.

Robert was. But he began to realise that something was amiss. That the train was two quiet. That his fellow travellers were too deeply asleep. In between the stories he tried to ask questions, but the woman in white gave him no answers.

Until her very last story, when everything would become clear ….

The ending was exactly right.

Everything was right – once again the words of Chris Priestley and the illustrations of David Roberts worked together quite beautifully.

I’m sorry that the trilogy is over, but now that it is I am quite sure that I will be going back to the beginning, visiting with Uncle Montague again, and listening to his tales.

If you haven’t met him yet, you really, really should …

I forget where I first spotted Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror, but I do remember that I was completely captivated by the cover.

And I was delighted to discover that it was a gothic and a portmanteau book – two things I can never resist.

Edgar is a solitary child – his parents are distant and, because he has been sent away to school, he is not close to the neighbourhood children. As the story opens with young Edgar walking through the woods to visit his Uncle Montague. The author takes you along on that walk, and you never leave Edgar’s side, through everything that is to come.

Menace is so cleverly hinted at with very small details – a slow-moving kissing-gate, silent children lurking in overgrown woods, a cold and heavy garden gate …

Finally Edgar and Uncle Montague settle down for tea, cake and stories in Uncle Montague’s wonderfully gothic house. And what stories! Each one is simple, clear, and perfectly-formed. And they are strange tales, each with a child protagonist, and each escalating to a striking twist.

A boy enters the house of a woman he believes to be a witch and meets a most unexpected fate; a girl opens a forbidden door and is trapped in a dolls’ house; a boy chased off a cliff by a demonic version of himself; a girl granted three wishes who finds that those wishes have dark consequences…. It would be unfair to say too much.

Some of the stories are stronger than others but they all work. And, while each is distinctive, they come together well as a set.

But that’s not all. Edgar and Uncle Montague talk between stories, and their own story develops. Edgar begins to wonder. Is there is truth in the stories? Where have the artefacts that Uncle Montague shows him come from? And who are the strange children trying to gain access to the house?

All becomes clear in the astonishing final story – Uncle Montague’s own.

Everything comes togethere just perfectly.

Tribute is paid to many great writers of ghost stories and the volume itself is a lovely little hardback, beautifully illustrated by David Roberts.

Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror is a chilren’s book but it makes wonderful reading for adults too – and it would be lovely for parents or grandparents to read to children with a love of scary things.