Highly frightening and effective.
A disturbed girl takes a night job in a notoriously haunted hotel with disastrous results.
Sixteen-year-old Noelle has spent her childhood taking care of her despised, morbidly obese, chronically ill father. To escape, she accepts a job at The Boy Meets Girl Inn, site of a famous mass murder and, local residents believe, massively haunted. Hogarth tells most of the story through Noelle’s diary, which, after Noelle’s death in the 1990s, falls into the hands of a movie producer who intends to make a whole series of fright films based on it. Noelle endows the diary with life and speaks to it as another character. Readers see her increasingly unhinged writing, punctuated by several fugue-state entries in which she appears to interact with the local ghosts and torture a cat, although these episodes may be completely imaginary. The author paints Noelle as the mother of all unreliable narrators, allowing readers to make up their own minds about her possible guilt. Could she actually have killed herself by hitting herself in the head with a pickax as the diary strongly implies? That possibility, the gruesome murders involving cannibalism, and the cat-torture scenes make this book disturbing enough to contend with serious horror novels. The annotations in the diary by the producer lend the book a nice psychological verisimilitude.
Highly frightening and effective. (Horror. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7387-4472-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flux
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
A brief, engaging, and at times grisly mystery that will keep readers guessing.
Four ghost-hunting friends travel to Los Angeles to film overnight at the Hearst Hotel, a site notorious for its violent past, in this supernatural thriller.
Told in alternating first-person perspectives by Las Vegas teens Chrissy, Chase, Emmaline, and Kiki, the story stays tightly focused on their clandestine Halloween weekend road trip, quickly filling in their background at the beginning as a team who regularly post to a popular YouTube channel they created about ghostly happenings. Chrissy is the only one with the psychic ability to perceive ghosts, an experience that has left her traumatized since she first began seeing spectral beings when her mother became ill and died when she was a child. Her disturbing experience at the hotel is described in grim detail as she runs into the mutilated ghosts of one murdered young woman after another, which doesn’t always mesh with the slow-burn romance subplot as Bram, a fellow psychic, appears on the scene and, to Chase’s chagrin, seems to be sweeping Chrissy off her feet (Emma also nurses a crush on Kiki). Creepy hotel managers, jump scares, and an overall eerie atmosphere are entertaining, and the plot moves swiftly through familiar genre territory. Most significant characters default to White; Kiki has dark-brown skin.
A brief, engaging, and at times grisly mystery that will keep readers guessing. (Supernatural thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48348-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Underlined
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A chilling, bloody ghost story that resonates.
A Japanese ghost tries to fight an evil spirit that haunts a 15-year-old boy in this strange, Stephen King–like horror story.
Okiku was brutally murdered 300 years ago at age 16 and has roamed the world ever since, killing child murderers. Murderers unwittingly carry the ghosts of those they have killed on their backs, making them easy for Okiku to spot. She’s chasing down a particularly nasty serial killer when she encounters Tarquin, the son of an American man and a Japanese woman. Now institutionalized, Tarquin’s mother inscribed strange tattoos on the boy, which act as seals to imprison the evil ghost inside him. The family travels to Japan after Tarquin’s captive spirit horribly murders his mother so they can scatter the dead woman’s ashes at a shrine. There, they meet some women who can try to free Tarquin from his spirit tormentor, but exorcisms aren’t easy. Chupeco bases her modern horror story on an old Japanese folk tale about a vengeful spirit named Okiku. She writes in Okiku’s formal, ghostly voice, requiring readers to piece together strange episodes that introduce not only Okiku, but also Tarquin and his family, only slowly revealing the severity of the danger Tarquin faces. They come together eventually to reveal the full story and, with their opacity, contribute to the book’s slowly mounting suspense.
A chilling, bloody ghost story that resonates. (Paranormal suspense. 14-18)Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-9218-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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