“A good scary book thrills in a way no other genre can quite match, it simply demands to be read,” says children’s horror author Rachel Burge as I interview her, appropriately enough, on Halloween.

Burge has just published her fourth book Whispering Hollow, a spook-fest which melds contemporary teenage life with painstakingly researched English faerie folklore (hard to know which is the scarier, I know…) in a gripping, darting, twisting page-turner of a novel.

But be warned, these are not…