HE CAME FROM THE SHADOWS

Ragged, grinning Mr. Stands knows your deepest wishes and— horribly—wants to grant them. Jules Dwyer, 15, has been as gloomy as everyone else in Eastfield since the colliery closed. Now Mr. Stands arrives and turns things around: dingy houses look brighter, new bikes, cars, and appliances appear as if by magic, and Jules meets beautiful, mysterious new classmate Rachel. Stands, saying he's just beginning, promises a Big Day soon. Haunted by terrifying dreams, Jules and Rachel rightly suspect that a malign force lies behind the town's sudden good fortune. When Jules's sister Laurie disappears, his search for her takes him into an old mine that Stands—feeding in some eldritch way on the little girl's hyperactive imagination—plans to reopen with the resurrected bodies of miners who have died there. Westwood uses every tool in the horror novelist's kit: atmospheric language, forebodings, in sinister toys, marching zombies, and a Bad Guy who explodes at the climax into a cloud of loathsome, batlike creatures. When Laurie finally turns her imaginative powers against Stands and wishes him gone, he vanishes—and so does Rachel. A macabre story (this British author's first YA book) with a memorable title character and a riveting first chapter. (Fiction. 12-15)