Matthew Holmes, the Walter Mitty of the schoolyard set, and his exuberantly comic nighttime adventures have been very popular since Allen Morgan’s picture book series began in 1984. By day, Matthew, a typical hyperactive boy, does all the typical stuff boys love to do. By night, in Morgan’s inspired riff on dream work, all of Matthew’s daytime activities, frustrations, and imaginings reappear, zanily transformed by wish-fulfillment, in his dream fantasies.

In book after book, there’s no deviation from this successful formula, and that’s true once again in Matthew and the Midnight Firefighter. During the day Matthew pretends to be a firefighter, and in the evening he watches a fireworks display with his mother. At night, he wakes up to find a sizzling fireworks rocket on his bedroom floor, and is dousing it out with a glass of water just as Fast Eddie, the Midnight Firefighter, climbs through the window with a hose. Seeing that Matthew has firefighter potential, Fast Eddie invites Matthew to join him and the crew for a night of battling blazes. By dawn, Matthew has proven he’s got the right stuff and is made Assistant Midnight Fire Chief.

As always, the highly energetic, inventive illustrations by Michael Martchenko animate Morgan’s just-do-the-job prose, providing the colour and comedy lacking in the text. Martchenko’s Matthew is such a live wire that he practically jumps off the page.

Undeniably children (and adults) delight in repetition of the familiar pleasures of a series. But too much of the same, of even a good thing, can become predictable and tired. You can’t help but wish that Morgan would cut loose and take some creative risks in his prose, and infuse his appealing, satisfying series with a little more of the wild anarchy of Dr. Seuss and the imaginative depth of Sendak.