Start with Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events. Subtract the coy, arch attitude, and all the little comments about just how awful everything is. Place the story in approximately Dickensian England…but don’t pick up Dickens’ wordiness. Make the story far more awful and gripping in its horrors, but give it a reasonable happy ending. Improve and deepen the writing throughout. Now forget Snicket altogether. That should give you a glimmering of what Joan Aiken’s children’s books are like.

The canonical Aiken remains The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, but Midnight is a Place is similar in tone. It’s a tale of two children put into an impossible position and forced to work to support themselves at a carpet factory during the early phases of the Industrial revolution. It’s not an exposé, as some of Dickens’ work was; rather, the horrible conditions, fatality rate, and enormous machines in the factory are played almost entirely for chills, and effectively so.

I’m not sure the book is entirely a success; the ending struck me as rather abrupt and not entirely satisfactory. But it the characters are well-drawn and their doings are interesting–and if I read it to the kids properly, they’d most likely have nightmares about the carpet press. That’s got to be worth something.