The atmosphere in this unsettling story is dark and eerie. There is an uncomfortable emotional disconnectedness between the family members and, while the collage artwork is certainly strikingly unusual and impressive, many of the images are scary. The characters have a weirdly vacant look. Inhabiting a world that is shadowy and mysterious looking, their actions and conversations are similarly disjointed and confusing. When the wolves appear in the story, they are drawn in a manic, cartoon style different from the human characters, but in some ways more frightening.

The narrative underpinnings of the story are sound and the storyline moves in a neat circle. Lucy, the main character, can see and hear clearly what the rest of the family ignores, and she feels a terrible sense of isolation as a result. Perhaps young children in a similar situation would identify with her, but the action and images in the book are so distressing that there can be little understanding or comfort to be gained from this story. That the situation repeats in the end is clever, but, again, such a pessimistic conclusion for a children's picture book (Grimm's fairy tales notwithstanding) is worrying.

Both author, Neil Gaiman, and illustrator, Dave McKean, have won many awards for their collaborations on graphic novels for teenagers and adults, including their popular Sandman Series. They have also created two other books for children: Coraline and The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish. They have tremendous talent, but their vision is bleaker than what many people might choose to share with young children.

From the book:
In the middle of the night when everything was still, she heard clawing and gnawing, nibbling and squabbling. She could hear the wolves in the walls, plotting their wolfish plots, hatching their wolfish schemes. In the day, Lucy felt eyes upon her, watching from the cracks and from the holes in the walls. They peeped through the eyes in paintings.

She went to talk to her father. "There are wolves in the walls," she told him. "I don't think there are, poppet," he told her. "You have an overactive imagination."