A children’s book brave enough to let a kind wish do real damage.
Jack Mackay opens The Haunting of Old Splinter on the coldest, wettest day of a cold, wet summer, and never once lets the daylight make you feel safe. His second novel takes the oldest cursed object in horror, the wishing claw, and hands it to two brothers desperate to save their fracturing family. This is middle-grade horror that trusts young readers with real dread, real grief and a proper monkey’s-paw bargain. If Gloam announced a talent, Old Splinter confirms it. Here is a retelling of “The Monkey’s Paw” for a new generation.
Mackay takes the oldest cursed hand in horror and hands it to two comic-mad brothers on a Yorkshire moor, then builds his dread like damp in an old wall, unseen until the whole room reeks of it. Middle-grade horror brave enough to let a child’s kindest wish do real damage.
The Haunting of Old Splinter by Jack Mackay: A Wish Best Left Unmade
The Haunting of Old Splinter | Jack Mackay | Viking (Penguin Random House) | July 2026 |
A middle-aged man lives inside a purple clothes-donation bin in the car park behind the town hall, and he turns out to be the truest friend two frightened boys have got.
That man is Alfie, and the first time Peter and Adrian meet him he growls “Yummy!” through the deposit slot to give them a fright. It tells you almost everything about the register Jack Mackay is working in. This is a book that will make an eight-year-old laugh out loud on one page and check the landing before they go to bed on the next.
The Haunting of Old Splinter is Mackay’s second novel, and it takes one of the oldest horror stories in the language, W.W. Jacobs and his mouldering monkey’s paw, then hands the cursed thing to a couple of comic-mad kids on a Yorkshire moor. The result is middle-grade horror that respects its readers enough to actually scare them.
Barghest-on-the-Moor is the kind of town where the doors are painted bright colours and the fields are stitched into a patchwork of green and purple by dry-stone walls. A barghest, if you did not grow up hearing about it, is a great spectral black dog from the folklore of the north of England, a death omen with glowing eyes. Mackay names his town after a monster and then dares you to forget it.
The horror here builds slow, and it builds clever. There is no thunderstorm on page one. The story opens on the coldest, wettest day of a cold, wet summer. It is a small choice that does a lot of work. The dread arrives in daylight, when you least expect to feel it. Peter Carney and his half-brother Adrian Lee live in the old gardener’s cottage on the estate. Peter’s stepdad, George, is trying to renovate the ruined mansion for his wealthy brother, Uncle Lawrence. Money is tight. Tempers are fraying. And Alfie, who is nothing if not a showman, tells the boys a story about a magician who once lived there and about a hand that grants wishes.
The tension in this book works like damp in an old wall. You do not see it arrive. You just notice, one afternoon, that the whole room has started to smell of it. By the time the knocking begins, Mackay has spent so long making you love this small, wobbling family that every wish lands like a blow.
The setting does a huge amount of the heavy lifting, and Mackay knows it. A renovation is a perfect engine for horror. You are pulling a building apart, stripping back plaster, opening up walls that have been sealed for a lifetime, and you never quite know what was left inside.
Old Splinter was built by a man who wanted somewhere big enough for his ambitions and secret enough for his secrets. When George starts prising the place open for Uncle Lawrence, he is doing exactly the thing every instinct in a horror story tells you not to do. The mansion is not just a backdrop. It is a lid, and the whole book is the sound of it slowly coming loose.
Mackay writes in a close third person that sits just behind Peter’s shoulder, and he trusts his young reader completely. The prose is plain in the best sense, clean and quick, never showing off, so that when a properly frightening image lands it lands hard. He opens the whole novel by telling you it went wrong. “It was all Uncle Lawrence’s fault,” Peter thinks, before admitting he really blames himself. You read the entire book knowing a mistake is coming and unable to stop it. That is a confident bit of engineering from a writer only on his second outing.
The dialogue between the brothers drives the story. It is funny, quick and completely believable. When Adrian splits his chin open early on and mutters that his problem is that it is his chin that is bleeding, you understand these two in a sentence. Their running “Bro Promise” gag, the unbreakable oath with no loopholes, is exactly the sort of ritual real brothers invent, and Mackay later uses it to twist the knife.
He has stuffed the book with horror literacy too, worn lightly. Adrian reads a comic called Ghastliest Tales, quotes Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Black Cat” from memory, and namechecks Spring-Heeled Jack leaping across rooftops. There is a nod to Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. None of it feels like homework. It feels like a kid who loves being scared, written by an adult who clearly still remembers the feeling. I would guess Mackay’s other life as a theatre-maker feeds this. The book has a real sense of the stage about it. You can feel a storyteller building anticipation, then choosing the exact moment to drop the lights.
Beneath the severed hand and the knocking, this is a book about a boy who is not sure he belongs in his own family.
Peter has agreed not to call George “Dad” in front of Adrian, because Adrian only has one father and Peter has two. His real dad, Robert, lives an hour away in Leeds, and the family will not accept Robert’s money even when they are drowning. So Peter carries a quiet, constant worry that he is the loose thread, the one who might be sent away if things fall apart. That is the wound the wishing claw goes looking for. The boys do not chase the hand out of greed. They chase it because their mum and their stepdad are miserable and they cannot bear to do nothing.
Which is the cruelty at the centre of every good monkey’s paw story. The wish is love. The price is horrible. Mackay understands that a child’s deepest desire, to hold a fracturing family together, is exactly the kind of longing that a wicked magic will punish. Take Randall Clair Ravenite, the occultist who once owned the claw. He grafted it to his own body, then bricked himself away with it. He is greed made grotesque. The boys are his opposite. And the book asks a hard question: are good intentions enough to survive a bargain like this?
There is a lovely bit of mercy tucked in here as well. When the brothers wish for a dog, half-braced for a Cujo situation, the dog they get, Poe, is simply a good dog. Not every wish turns to rot. Mackay lets one land clean, which makes the ones that curdle so much worse, and gives the reader something warm to hold onto in the dark.
Mackay’s debut, Gloam, arrived in 2025 and earned itself a spot as The Times Children’s Book of the Week. That book followed thirteen-year-old Gwen Clayton-Fenn, grieving her mother and squaring up to Esme Laverne, the too-perfect babysitter with too-sharp teeth. Grief, a crumbling house, a hard-trying stepdad, a monster with an appetite, and siblings who only win by standing together.
Read the two books side by side and you can see the same heart beating. Mackay keeps returning to fractured and blended families, to the terror of a home that stops feeling safe, and to the idea that children are braver than the adults around them realise. He has said he believes horror can be life-affirming, and both novels prove he means it.
What has sharpened between Gloam and Old Splinter is control. Where Gloam was a nightmare-quest that wore its love of Coraline on its sleeve, this second book is a tighter machine, a morality engine with the shape of a folk tale. He has swapped a sprawling dreamscape for a single, escalating question: what will one small wish cost? The scares are more precise for it. The grief is quieter and, somehow, sadder.
We are living through a bold stretch of middle-grade horror, and Mackay belongs near the front of it. The publisher points at Katherine Arden and R.L. Stine, and both fit; Arden’s Small Spaces books share this instinct for turning the everyday world sinister, while Stine supplies the pure, unashamed love of a good scare for its own sake.
But the book Mackay is really in conversation with is a century-old short story most kids have never read, and that is where he pulls ahead of his shelf-mates. Plenty of authors write children’s ghost stories. Fewer take a genuinely bleak adult horror premise, the wish that comes true and destroys you, and trust a nine-year-old to sit with it without softening the edges. He keeps the warmth, the daft jokes, the brotherly love, and he refuses to blunt the horror underneath. That balance is the hardest trick in this whole corner of the genre, and he makes it look easy.
It sits comfortably at the emotionally serious end of the shelf, too. Think of Patrick Ness and A Monster Calls. In books like that, the scars and the grief are the same substance, not separate ingredients. What sets Old Splinter apart is its source. Reaching back past the usual influences to a single savage Edwardian short story gives the book a spine that a lot of children’s horror lacks. It has the shape of a fable and the sting of a warning, and Mackay never once wags a finger while delivering it.
This is where children’s horror is heading. Sadder, braver, less willing to tuck its readers in. Mackay is helping to steer it there.
Mackay understands the cruellest rule in horror, the one Jacobs knew a century ago: the wish that ruins you is the one that comes true. Hand this book to a brave child, then keep one eye on the walls of your own house.
The Haunting of Old Splinter by Jack Mackay
Peter and his half-brother Adrian live in the shadow of Old Splinter – the ruined mansion on the hill, where legends of ancient relics and dark magic swirl. And the cracks are starting to show in their once-happy family. Faced with the daunting task of renovating the place, Peter’s stepdad is at his wits’ end and the boys feel powerless to help.
Then Peter unearths a horrifying secret in the walls of the mansion and the brothers realise there’s some truth to the terrifying tales. If the Wishing Claw is real, it can grant their deepest desires – and it might just bring their family back together.
But wishes are tricky things and Peter unleashes much more than he bargained for. When a monstrous hunger comes knocking at his door, he must find a way to undo his wish before it’s too late.
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