Ben’s Gargoyle by Keith Gray ill. Keith Robinson

ACHUKA Book of the Day 14 Jul 2026

Publisher: Barrington Stoke ISBN: 9780008774615

Whoah, this is such a strong, powerful and scary horror story from Keith Gray.

Ben lives with his dad in a flat at the top of a shared house. He has an attic room. His mum has left to start a new life in France. The book opens with Ben having been sent home from school for fighting. Through a toy telescope that he was given when he was younger he is amazed to see a gargoyle moving, prowling, then catching and eating a pigeon.

Keith Robinson’s dark and moody illustrations are a perfect match for the tone of this well-paced study of a boy caught up in a horrific situation. The father is a bully and Ben’s black eye that we originally assume came from the fight was in fact inflicted, albeit partly accidentally, by the dad.

The ending, in which the gargoyle enters Ben’s room and buries itself inside his ribcage, is deeply unsettling but also highly liberating.

When Ben sees a monstrous gargoyle creeping across the midnight rooftops, he’s desperate to tell someone. But Ben feels alone in his new home and is finding it hard fitting in at his new school.

Ben’s dad doesn’t believe him. He’s always angry. He says Ben needs to act his age, stand up to the school bullies and “be a man”. But can Ben find the courage to stand up to the biggest bully of all? And every night the gargoyle creeps closer.

You can follow Keith on Instagram:

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The illustrator’s there too:

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Keith Gray’s first novel, Creepers, was published thirty years ago and he wrote recently: “Pre-internet and email, Creepers had been typed on a word processor, printed, stuffed in envelopes, and Royal Mail posted to addresses I found in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. It was actually the 3rd book I’d written, the first 2 getting roundly rejected oh-so-many times. And this book was rejected by several (7?) publishers before being picked up by the wonderful editor Miriam Hodgson at Mammoth, an imprint of Reed, which no longer exists. As a young reader, one of my greatest inspirations was an author called Robert Westall, and especially his novel The Machine Gunners. When I discovered Miriam Hodgson was his editor too, I think I was almost as excited to meet her as I was to be finally getting published! Robert Westall had died only a couple of years previously, I would have loved to have met him and said ‘Thank you’, but he receives a name-check in Creepers. Miriam Hodgson was the first of several amazing editors I’ve worked with. She is sadly no longer with us either, but everything she taught me back then has been invaluable in helping me keep writing books over the last 30 years.”

I reviewed Creepers enthusiastically. I wish I still had a copy of what I said because something in what I wrote moved Gray’s editor, Miriam Hodgson, to invite me to have lunch with her and her (then) assistant, Cally Poplak, who went on to head up Egmont and is now MD of HarperCollins Children’s Books. I remember our conversation of thirty years ago so well.

Jamila Gavin pays tribute to Miriam in a recent edition of The Gab, compiled by Jon Appleton, writing, “She had the ability to strengthen your ideas and structure, while always recognising the quality of your voice. I could expect pages of notes, yet never dreading them. They were wise, accurate, and I could always trust them, knowing that she was there to guide and help me, and werenever against me. But if I didn’t accept something, we invariably talked it through on the phone.”

Jamila goes on to contrast this with a later experience with a different publisher: “I was given an editor whose agenda, I felt, was a book that almost fitted an algorithm, or certainly a kind of market format: what sells best; not too long, and not too many characters; you don’t need this person, or merge that character with this one. None of the suggestions, I felt, were to tell my story, but to write a pre-conceived product. I asked my agent to withdraw it.” The adds, “I could never have done that had I been a new writer!”

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Originally published at https://www.achuka.co.uk on July 14, 2026.