Six years ago, York poet, writer and musician Miles Salter I had a moment of inspiration.

"What if, the little mental bang inside my brain went, I could re-write ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ for today’s audience," he says. "My version would be a cracking story with adventure and humour and fun, eccentric characters. It could, I thought, be irresistible to kids."

It has taken six years, and there have been lots of changes along the way. "The title went from ‘A Werewolf Ate My Granny’ to ‘The Werewolf and Mrs Winters’ to the final version - ‘Howl: A Small and Heavy Adventure’," Miles says. "The story changed, too. Early on, I resolved to make the ‘Wolf’ in Little Red Riding Hood a Werewolf, and change the gender of the heroine. I actually wrote numerous versions of a scene where the Wolf ate one of the characters, before this scene was, eventually, binned. I also threw out one of the minor characters, a bungling policeman called Hibbert, and the ‘Granny’ character changed into a strange old woman called Mrs Winters."

But now, all those re-writes, and all that authorial blood and sweat later, the result has been published by Caboodle Books.

Howl: A Small and Heavy Adventure features James Small, a typical troublesome schoolboy in the dandy tradition, and his best friend Neville Heavy - the son of the local vicar, and a bit of a four-eyes swot who nevertheless continually finds himself getting into scrapes.

They live in the little town of Rigour Mortice, where nothing much ever happens - unless it is James and Neville getting up to one of their pranks.

But then an unsettling new teacher comes to the pair's primary school - and James is shipped off to live with a strange old woman when his parents have to go away for a few weeks.

Cue plenty of strange goings on involving a witch, a werewolf, two naughty schoolboys - and a flood that threatens to engulf the whole town.

Howl is a bit old-fashioned in some ways. These definitely aren't contemporary schoolchildren. Mobile phones and instagram accounts never get a look in, and there's not a tee-short or iPod in sight.

James and Neville are children from a different, earlier generation. But they're great fun, the werewolf is wonderfully sinister, and that witch... she's a hoot.

* Howl: A Small and Heavy Adventure by Miles Salter is published by Caboodle Books, priced £5.99.