The Trip
(Book)

Keats begins abruptly with Louie, lonely in a drab new home, unaccountably constructing a peepshow city in a shoebox. But this combination of collage and childlike drawing does make an enticing, dreamlike background for Louie's imagined trip back to the old neighborhood. While there, Louie runs into a group of strange monsters who turn out to be his old friends in imaginative Halloween disguise; and their friendly cries of "Trick or treat," while Louie wafts home in his bright red airplane, blend with the real voices of his new neighbors as, helped by his mother into an ice-cream-cone costume, Louie goes outside to join them. A pleasing, neatly dovetailed adjustment fantasy, nicely tuned to the garish make-believe mood of the holiday.