Tim Wynne-Jones seems to have a golden touch when it comes to books for young people. His very first book, Zoom, was a huge Canadian and international success with its combination of Wynne-Jones’s own bizarre imagination and a staple of the children’s book trade, an interesting animal. His more recent young-adult works, Some of the Kinder Planets and The Maestro, have garnered Governor General’s awards and bestsellerdom. Lately – between serious kids’ books, you might say – Wynne-Jones has turned his hand to retelling the classics: The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996 and Dracula for this fall’s book season.

Such adaptations can be a risky enterprise. Just ask Barbara Greenwood, whose efforts to retell Anne of Green Gables garnered a number of critical brickbats for tampering with a Canadian classic. While teachers and librarians might quietly praise her efforts to bring the book to younger and less-able readers, critics were not nearly as kind.

But Tim Wynne-Jones is luckily not tampering with semi-sacred Canadian works. While we still expect Canadian children to read Anne of Green Gables in the original as a rite of pre-teen passage, no one expects kids to handle Victor Hugo or Bram Stoker in the original. Children never did – these adult novels were read to the whole family, with children included only when they were in earshot of whoever in the household was literate enough to read aloud.

So Tim Wynne-Jones wasn’t risking his critical reputation when he adapted The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Nor did his golden touch fail him in the process of adapting the book. Gwyneth Evans, writing in Quill & Quire, gave his Hunchback a starred review, praising the book’s vivid dialogue and powerful descriptive passages, contrasting his “rich and active prose” with the saccharine mess offered up by the Disney studios. Wynne-Jones even managed to soften the dire ending of Victor Hugo’s classic without offending the critical world.

Of course, few parents have ever read The Hunchback of Notre Dame or more than a handful of other classics in the original, so the somewhat-brightened ending might well go unnoticed. Like it or not, the classics came to most of us through chopped-down Little Golden Books, sanitized Disney films and stories, and that famous-but-now-abandoned line of Classic Comics. If we set these as the competition to Key Porter’s Classic Horror Series, then there’s no question about the winner: Tim Wynne-Jones by a knockout.

Dracula retells the 100-year-old Bram Stoker novel in 48 pages of picture book text, about 4,000 words for those who take time to count them. Wynne-Jones has kept the text wonderfully musical in its flow, yet dotted with period vocabulary that will cause curious children to ask, “What’s a calèche?” (It’s a light carriage with a folding top, by the way.) Nonetheless, this is no book for eight-year-olds to tackle on their own. The vocabulary is often tough and the story is downright scary.

Tim Wynne-Jones has decided to render Stoker’s sometimes-epistolary novel as a set of transcripts of journals and “recordings made on Mr. Thomas Edison’s remarkable phonographic device.” Contrived as this may seem, it actually works, and the narrative is clear enough that few children would have to ask, “Who’s talking now?”

Our modern storyteller writes with a lushness and sense of rhythm that make his adaptation far better than Stoker’s clumsy original. Wynne-Jones knows how to set a mysterious mood, pick up the pace for tension, and give dialogue a desperate air that makes the book such a joy to read and read aloud. It is Tim Wynne-Jones as stylist that makes this Dracula work.

But the illustrations for Dracula are less successful. Gál is a distinguished Canadian illustrator who has twice won Canada Council awards for his art: for The Little Mermaid and Janet Lunn’s The Twelve Dancing Princesses. He has a magical, luminous style that works well in stories like these and his 1995 picture book Merlin’s Castle. Unfortunately, here he offers flat, dull illustrations that look as if the life blood had already been sucked from them. Dracula might well be a concentration-camp victim, Lucy a Renaissance Venus, the other characters little more than crayon sketches. The text may be full of brooding terror, but the illustrations do nothing to convey the mood.

However, the book survives the illustrations. With text like, “His lips were redder than ever and gouts of fresh blood trickled from the corners of his mouth,” readers can let their minds create an image to which the illustration does little justice. Incidentally, Tim Wynne-Jones is apparently taking time off from the Classic Horror Series to work on another novel, part of his more serious oeuvre. For readers waiting for the third installment of his horror retellings, Tim Wynne-Jones’s Frankenstein is due out in 1999. Let’s hope it gets the illustrations it deserves.