“Funny with a Touch of Baba Yaga”. It’s a Scritch! Scratch! Q&A with Teri Sloat and Zuzana Čupová

Been in a grocery store lately? Don’t look too closely, or you might spot the Halloween candy already on display. And in the Binny’s? There’s that pumpkin ale again. Seems like spooky season creeps up on us earlier and earlier every year. I just sent my kids off to school, but I’m not ready to bid farewell to summer…

… except when it comes to picture books. Because truth be told, there is nothing I like better than a good old-fashioned, evocative Halloween-adjacent tale. And if creepy vibes are what your kid readers are hankering for, then let me introduce to you the star of the season.

Scritch! Scratch! An Itchy, Witchy Halloween Tale by Teri Sloat with art from Zuzana Čupová (out now) could easily blend into the morass of Halloween picture books out this year. Yet this is the exact reason I read so many of them. Once in a great while you find a book that stands apart. Wait, let me read my notes and see what I wrote about this book. Ah…. yes. I see that I described it in this way: “We see a lot of Halloween books in a given year but so rarely do we get one that highlights the FEEL of the season as well as this. Sloat and Čupová aren’t afraid to get a little creepy and a little scary… This is precisely the kind of book that will linger in a child’s mind for decades and decades.”

I stand by that. But you may wish to read an actual description of the book as well. The publisher provides the following:

“Scritch! Scratch!
What was that?
The witch!
She’s in the pumpkin patch!

In the sky, through the pumpkin patch, between the trees…the kids in this story have to be crafty if they want to avoid the witch and her spell! But she is determined to keep them on their toes with a few tricks up her sleeve…

Delightfully eccentric illustrations and silly-scary rhymes make for a fresh take on the traditional Halloween story in this picture book from Teri Sloat.”

Intrigued? Then let us do as the grocery stores do and talk Halloween, baby! I had questions for the creators:

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Betsy Bird: Teri! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. So, every year I try to find that one spooky/Halloween-adjacent book that really knocks it out of the water. This year that book, without a doubt, is Scritch Scratch. It’s evocative and weird and unnerving in the best possible way. Tell us a little bit about where this book came from. How did you come up with it?

Teri Sloat: Hi Betsy, thank you for loving SCRITCH! SCRATCH! And Halloween!

The actual inspiration for this story was the result of my own overactive imagination as a seven- or eight-year-old.  My cousin and I were trying to go to sleep in my aunt’s house. We kept hearing “swoosh swish” outside the window, and between us we conjured up the sound of someone outside coming to get us.  As soon as we got up to run out of the bedroom, we saw that it was the window blind dragging on the floor in the breeze. It’s amazing how your imagination can go from zero to sixty spinning a story.

SCRITCH! SCRATCH! started as a Halloween poem.  I showed it to my agent, Abigail Samoun, and her enthusiasm made me realize it was just right for a book.

BB: Ah! So it was intended to be Halloween-ish then! And Zuzana, thank you so much for answering some of my questions about the incredible Scritch Scratch too. Let’s just start at the very beginning here. How did you come to learn about this manuscript and what about it appealed to you?

Zuzana Čupová: Well, that was simple. My agent Abi from Red Fox Literary (who, I believe, is also Teri’s agent) sent me the manuscript asking if it wouldn’t interest me, and it did. Partly because I enjoy books which are more on the quirky/scary side and have done so ever since I was a child, and partly because there is so much space for illustrations. In most of the storybooks on which I worked before, illustration was secondary, while in Scritch! Scratch! illustrations help to tell the story itself, which was a new and exciting experience for me.

BB: Okay, well let’s talk inspirations then. When I was a kid, stories with witches were often my favorite. What were some of your inspirations for this book? Anything you remember reading yourself?

Teri: From Hansel and Gretel, to the Wizard of Oz, to Baba Yaga, to Hocus Pocus I have been addicted to the many ideas of witches, their shapeshifting, their spells, etc., as well as all things Halloween. I have even published a Halloween Joke Book. 

BB: Nice! Of course, I always consider it a bit of a risk to engage in rhyme in a book, but you have it well in hand. In writing the book did the rhymes just spill out of you naturally or did the first draft vary considerably from the final product?

Teri: Rhyme is risky, for sure. It is easy for the rhyming words to dictate the story instead of rewriting and rewriting until the rhyme adds fun of word play to a good plot. I must admit, rhyme often spills out into story form for me.  Of my 27 or so books, about half are in rhyme. I love the way alliteration and internal rhyme tickles the ear, and my editor, Sara Sargent gave me free reign to use imperfect rhyme for the cadence and fun or reading out loud. It gives me the freedom to use spicier words while creating a story that is fun to join in on. My best friends for rhyming stories are the rhyming dictionary and the synonym finder, as well, BUT, when I send off the ‘final’ revision that I am happy with at the time, it is with the knowledge it will become a lot tighter once I start working with my editor.

BB: And along those lines, Zuzana, the nice thing about Teri’s text is that it gives you a fair amount of leeway to play around with different ideas visually. For example, there’s the part where the kids’ feet stick to the floor. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the decisions you made on these spreads?

Zuzana: If it’s my decision, then I go by feeling; it’s hard to explain in words. Some of the compositions are clear from the start, in which case it feels like there is no other way to make it. Some have to be changed a lot – that goes for the part with shoes turned to glue. Originally, the text there was a bit longer and the spell, apart from just gluing their shoes to the floor, also made them itch and twitch. So, the spread used to be full of children scratching (and scritching) themselves.

BB: Hrm. Yeah, I like the current version more, I must say. Along the same lines, Teri, were there any other plot points that changed from your earliest of drafts or was it generally pretty much the same?

Teri: Mmmm…There was one. In the original draft the witch was just in the imagination with shadows that alluded to a witch, but thanks to Zuzana’s illustrations the witch was more visual, which is actually what my imagination was seeing. And when something has scared you, and any noise could be that something coming back, you are still on guard. So, I wanted the story to be a bit open-ended…was the witch back in cat form or was it just a cute little cat? Which leads me to Zuzana’s amazing art….those red eyes.

BB: Oh yeah. Speaking of which, Zuzana I’m quite interested in the medium of the book. Why did you decide to go with watercolor for these pages? And was the color scheme an idea from the start or did it come later?

Zuzana: It’s a combination of black ink and orange watercolor. I wanted to use traditional media from the start, especially because at the time when I made art samples for the book I worked in an animation studio, which meant a lot of sitting behind a computer, and I really needed a change. At the beginning I tried a few different techniques, but very soon we settled on this black and orange style. I generally love working with ink, and I think the bleeding, hazy color fits the scary mood. As for the color combination, vintage Halloween postcards were my inspiration.

BB: And in a book of this sort you have to walk a fine line between silly and scary. The witch has to feel like a genuine threat but American parents (at least) aren’t grateful when characters in picture books are so scary that they give their children nightmares. How did you model this witch?

Zuzana: That’s true, and I’m a very bad judge of what is still alright and what isn’t; also, there are some cultural differences. Both my agent and the people from the publishing house were a great help with that. Designing the witch wasn’t much of a problem, though. I went for “funny with a touch of Baba Yaga” right away. Also, keeping her in silhouette helps to make her mysterious but too simple to be terrifying.

BB: Teri, you were paired with the incomparable Zuzana Cupova in this book. How did you feel when you first started seeing some of the final art?

Teri: Zuzana’s art samples were exciting and so different from my own illustrations, which I did not feel fit the story. When I saw the first final art, it was clear she was going to add a whole extra layer or dimension to the story. She chose a limited palette which adds to the emotion of the story, the sounds become part of the art and energy of each page. And her spiders are absolutely perfect! The witch she ended up with was perfect with her red eyes, and that was the thing at the end of the story…those red eyes appearing in that cute little cat…that gave the story an ending up for interpretation. Just who was sitting on the mat? Who was that cat? Was the witch really gone?

BB: Exactly. Zuzana, was there anything you tried on an initial draft that you later had to reject?

Zuzana: Sure, which is also connected to the previous question about the balance of silly and scary. There is a spread where the witch catches a slug. In my original idea the animals were anthropomorphic, running away from the witch, terrified, carrying their children and belongings with them. I thought it quite funny but in the end we decided to change it rather than risk possible traumatizing of the readers.

BB: Good call. Finally, what else are you two working on these days? What’s next for you?

Teri: I have a couple of new manuscripts out for submission, looking for the right home. Right now, I am having fun, playing with rhyme again, for a quirky picture book love story, but as I have learned, it may become something else by the time it is done. I am also working on a book of poetry to go with a series of fine art paintings.

Zuzana: Last week I made the final touches on a book from Norwegian author Maria Parr whose books I’ve been illustrating for the Czech editions. And now I’m in the sketching phase of another big picture book. Similar format to Scritch! Scratch! but extremely detailed and colorful, which is very entertaining as it allows me to put a lot of hidden jokes into the backgrounds; I just hope it’ll turn out alright.

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I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into the upcoming season. Special thanks to both Teri and Zuzana for taking the time to answer my questions, and to Priyanka Godbole and the team at Random House Books for Young Readers for helping to put this together. Scritch! Scratch! An Itchy, Witchy Halloween Tale is out now, so no need to wait for autumn. You can start modestly terrorizing children now! Go to it!

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Interviews