DAEMON HALL

Famous author Ian Tremblin has chosen five teenagers to spend the night in his haunted mansion. The young aspiring writers and Tremblin will tell each other horror stories all night, and Tremblin will select the best storyteller, who will have a horror novel published. The motley crew of young writers is a veritable Breakfast Club lineup: Chris, the unexpectedly sensitive jock; Chelsea, the freaky Goth girl; Kara, the shy girl who doesn’t like horror; Demarius, the black adolescent whose main personality trait is being less dysfunctional than the others; and Wade, the panic-attack–plagued narrator. As the night progresses, the teens learn that spending the night in a haunted house is not as easy as they might have suspected. The short stories Tremblin and his protégés tell are of indifferent quality, appropriate as campfire tales more than short stories. The framing narrative, however, builds predictable but enjoyable tension as the characters’ fear and danger grow. An unexpectedly optimistic ending concludes this gentle horror tale. (Fiction. 12-14)