Jon Klassen has won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, and his latest book, The House With Nobody In It, is a board book shaped like a house with cutouts for doors. It’s a small book with a big trick: the words point out the objects in each room while stating there is “nobody” in the house, and a ghost looks on.
The book’s format is satisfying, and Klassen tells interviewer Janet Manley that he isn’t sure how ambitious it is. “If the publisher did have an oh NO moment, they kept it well-hidden,” he says. “Board books, from what I’ve seen, have all sorts of tricks they can do.”
The Room-to-Room Structure
Klassen says the movement from room to room was inspired by early video games. He cites the first iterations of Zelda and an Atari game called Adventure about a castle. In those games, players see a top-down view of rooms and areas, move to the edge of the screen, and choose to go through a door or a break in the forest. The screen changes, and the player is in the next room.
“I remember as a kid being so scared by the idea that your character onscreen is standing in an open doorway, but you don’t get to see what’s in the next room until you’re in it on the next screen,” Klassen says. “Not only that, but anything IN the next room can see you in the doorway before you see it.”
The book doesn’t use that idea too much, but the movement from room to room is definitely in there.
The Ghost and the Reader
The book’s narrator speaks in real-time, like guided meditation. Klassen says he remembers the sessions from high school. “Those sessions, and these books, are told more in real-time, as opposed to hearing a story in the past tense,” he says. “I really love the sound and feeling of present-tense writing, and the delivery of the person hosting those meditation sessions was always so flat and calm, even if something exciting might be happening.”
He adds that the book could be a simple object-learning exercise if you removed the ghost. “If you did actually remove the ghost, it turns into a simple object-learning exercise, and a weird one at that,” he says. “I like the idea of this book, if you can’t see the ghost, being a not-very-entertaining book that just thinks it is teaching you what a chair is.”
Manley wonders aloud whether the house has no one in it when the book isn’t being read. “It ceases to be a story unless the child is turning the pages,” she asks. Klassen says that wasn’t intended, but he likes the idea that readers become ghosts in the house themselves. “Why can we, the viewer, see him if the narrator/adult can’t? Can ghosts only see each other? What does that mean about us?”
Rules for Writing
Klassen leaned heavily on the book as an object for this project. The rooms are solid, click-filled colors, and he didn’t generate any art in the usual way. The cut-out doors and windows became just as much his “drawing” as the actual drawings.
“For illustrating, it wasn’t so much a rule, but I leaned heavier than I ever have before on the book as an object filling its own space on this one,” he says. “Letting the physicality of the book do a lot of the lifting was really fun.”
The title is Margaret Wise Brown-informed, Klassen says. “For a long time it was called ‘The Empty House,’ but that didn’t really work because the house isn’t empty. It has things in it,” he explains. “And ‘The House With Nobody In It’ is such a conspicuously odd thing to say if you really don’t think there’s anybody in there—it nails it.”
| Element | Inspiration |
|---|---|
| Room-to-room movement | Early video games, Zelda, Atari’s Adventure |
| Narrator’s voice | Guided meditation, present-tense delivery |
| Physicality | Click-filled colors, cut-out doors and windows |
| Title | Margaret Wise Brown-informed |
The book is a small thing, but it carries a lot of weight. It’s a reminder that board books are not just for babies. Adults want them too. Klassen’s work stays with kids, and it stays with grown-ups who read them aloud.
Klassen’s honesty about the making of the book is part of its charm. He admits he isn’t sure how ambitious it is, and he leans on the physical book itself to do the work. That willingness to let the object speak is what makes the book special.
The book is a quiet triumph of form following function. It doesn’t need a character the reader can relate to, because the reader is the character. Turn the pages, and you become the ghost in the house.
See the video the story is built around at Literary Hub.
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