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LIKE most modern children, my boys set enormous store (or, possibly sweet store) by Halloween. They will be beside themselves by Wednesday. And no wonder: Halloween gives licence to discouraged behaviour.

They can dress up and go out after dark (something I only get to do after organising a babysitter). They can maraud the neighbourhood, seeking out treats from whosoever has marked their house as fair game with a jack-o’-lantern — no helicopter-parent lectures about stranger danger on All Hallows’ Eve.

Many decry Halloween as a tawdry American import. Actually, it is a Celtic export, sold back to us with added E-numbers. One of my earliest memories is of trick or treating in 1970s Aberdeen. The trick was key: I had to sing the Skye Boat Song to bob for an apple or catch a treacle bun. Now there is more of a transactional meet-and-treat culture.

In truth, I’m excited too. It’s a big night in my little London neighbourhood, where most children attend the same schools and are electrified to be out after dark, playing at being just that teeny bit scared.

I can get petrified by full-blown horror, a genre undergoing a revival on our screens and in publishing. But I love being a little frightened: I am drawn to the uncanny and eerie.

One debut novel that has impressed me most in recent years is Andrew Michael Hurley’s Costa Prize-winning The Loney. In it, a Catholic family take their mute son on an Easter retreat to the hauntingly evoked Coldbarrow — its residents make the Deliverance yokels seem welcoming.

I was spellbound by Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, now a film starring Ruth Wilson and Charlotte Rampling. In the 1940s, a doctor is called to a dilapidated grand house to treat a frightened servant and is drawn into its troubled family’s orbit.

It takes great skill to ratchet up the tensions horror novels depend on, without it becoming ridiculous. I love Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s gothic satire Northanger Abbey for being both utterly susceptible to sensational fiction, and recognising that. After all, when it is dark outside, but you are snug indoors, a fright night can be fun.