HALLOWEENIES

A painful, comic retelling of five horror movies. Wisniewski is so familiar with these films that the inside jokes must be hilariously funny to him. However, it’s hard to imagine the young reader who has seen, or even heard of, the original movies and therefore hard to imagine them understanding the jokes. Though much of the humor is calculated to bring a groan rather than a guffaw, it’s hard to see how the intended audience will respond with anything but a blank look. The werewolf with a feminine haircut becomes a werewuss; a crazed hermit runs around insulting everyone in German; the castle has a big buttress and is dieting to lose it; space aliens in the form of toupees take over the mind of General Malaise and space girdles threaten to take their place. Some of the characters are stereotypic, if not downright racist: “More chins than a Chinese phone book,” the Tibetan guide, Duk Pin Bo Ling, and the Abominable Showman, who sounds like a stereotyped character in a bad Catskills production. Because many authors are trying to hop on Pilkey’s Captain Underpants bandwagon, the confused young readers will pick up this inviting-looking volume, with its hilarious illustrations, readable font, and comfortable white space and shake their heads in confusion. If the stories were not devoid of plot, older readers might like figuring out the puns and plays on words. (Fiction. 7-10)