Ostensibly a counting game in verse, this first collaboration between Tim Wynne-Jones and Dusan Petricic is a conceptually clever but esthetically flawed book. The narrator, a dapper old man, goes to Tumbledown Hill with his pet rabbit to take in the evening air and paint the landscape. They arrive to find the hill overrun by a gang of 26 monsters, pictured as hybrids of children and paint splatters. Instead of fleeing, the painter and his pet stand their ground, and the old man manages to paint the monsters right out of his head. The counting game involves the gradual elimination of words and their replacement by images. There are 26 boxed words (one for each of the monsters) and no pictures on the first page. Then, with each successive page, the number of words decreases by one and images begin to appear. The monsters are diminished along with the words until they are contained in the painter’s canvas on the last page, camouflaged among the shrubbery and clouds. The threat they have posed is also contained, because even though they remain in the scene, their presence is benign. One of the clouds, for instance, is picking its nose – hardly the stuff of children’s nightmares. The countdown in the book ingeniously develops the themes of diminishing fear and triumphant creativity, but I don’t think it was intended to help children with their numbers.

The text, as poetry, is disappointing. Wynne-Jones, who has written several picture books and novels for young readers, knows how to choose his words and is a master of narrative structure. But here, the diction is often forced by rhyme and the rhythm by word count. The watercolour and line pictures by Petricic, an Ontario-based illustrator and cartoonist, are well composed and playful. The garishly coloured child-monsters are quite ugly, but this may add to the reader’s sense of relief when they are finally blended into the landscape.