FRANKENSTEIN MOVED IN ON THE FOURTH FLOOR by Elizabeth Levy

 HERE'S A SHORT LITTLE MIDDLE-GRADE HORROR BOOK THAT LOOKS A LOT LIKE A SCHOLASTIC BOOK BUT ISN'T.  

I picked this up because it gave me serious THE GHOST ON SATURDAY NIGHT vibes which was a Scholastic book I bought when I was a kid back in the 70's.  I posted about THAT book several years ago during a previous Halloween Countdown and you can see that post HERE.   This book here was published in 1979 by Harper & Row (at least MY copy was) and features a ton of great illustrations by Mordicai Gerstein. 

Two young boys and their mom live on the 19th floor of a high-rise apartment building and a new tenant moves in on the fourth floor.  The boys catch sight of the guy (who's named Mr. Frank) moving in with wires and things sticking out of his head and they immediately assume he's Frankenstein.  The monster, not the doctor.  This distinction is indeed made by one of the boys; Frankenstein was the mad doctor and not his creation.  However, Mr. Frank appears to them to be something of a melding of both.  The first thing that happens is the elevator is stopped on the fourth floor and the boys & their mom have to hoof it up 19 flights of stairs.  Mr. Frank has some of his moving boxes blocking the elevator door so it won't close because, he says, they're full of delicate equipment which needs to be moved about slowly. 

Later, all the electicity in the building goes out and the landlord calls an electrician who traces the outage to room 4E -- Mr. Frank's room.  He must be using a helluva lot of electicity in there.  In the building's basement, every tenant has their own storage unit walled off with chicken wire and the boys decide to sneak into it and take a look around.  Mr. Frank might have spare body parts in there to make a new monster!  The boys get scared and run; however, the youngest leaves behind his Dracula action figure (with only one fang).  He's shown the Dracula around to a lot of people in the building and Mr. Frank will find it and know they were in his storage unit.  Mr. Frank is very rude, grumpy & brusque and no one in the building likes him. 

Mr. Frank does find the Dracula and stomps up to the kids' apartment where their Mom tells them the shouldn't poke around in other people's stuff but basically tells Mr. Frank to go scratch.  The next thing they know, Mr. Frank is moving out.  People in this building are two nosy.  The cool thing is, though, that all this could just be the wild imagination of some little kids who like horror stories.  However, we are never actually told or shown what exactly Mr. Frank is up to in his apartment that requires boxes and boxes of 'delicate' scientific equipment and uses so much electricity that he blacks out an entire high rise!  After Mr. Frank moves out, the kids go look at his now unlocked storage bin and it's empty. . . except for the Dracula action figure . . . with one arm torn off.  After all, Dr. Frankenstein DOES require body parts . . .