Hand to middle graders seeking horror laced with humor and tinged with budding romance.
Having saved Cauldron’s Cove from clones and zombies in previous books, Darius, Regan, and stepsiblings Sofia and Bennett reunite to protect their town once more.
Darius and his mom, the mayor of Cauldron’s Cove, are preparing for Halloween, a holiday that brings hordes of tourists to the town each year. When four carnival workers turn up drained of blood, levelheaded Darius, brainy and dyslexic Regan, prickly Sofia, and popular and resourceful Bennett investigate. A strange new family dressed in black has checked in to Regan’s family’s bed-and-breakfast, and Regan is crushing on their son…but could the newcomers be vampires? The four friends support each other through ups and downs—as when Regan is taunted by fatphobic bullies—all while stockpiling Super Soakers filled with holy water to wage war on the vampires. Intrepid readers who disregard the unseen narrator’s introductory warning of “super terrifying and grody scenes” to come will be rewarded. The narrator’s sophisticated vocabulary is balanced by the occasional mention of farts and “spoiler alerts.” The funny asides are most effective when they give readers a break from more intense moments. If scenes involving black vomit and bubbling skin seem a bit over the top for tweens, readers can’t say they weren’t warned. Darius is Black, while Sofia is Latine, and Regan and Bennett are white.
Hand to middle graders seeking horror laced with humor and tinged with budding romance. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781338815375
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
A didactic blueprint disguised as a supernatural treasure map.
A girl who delights in the macabre harnesses her inherited supernatural ability.
It’s not just her stark white hair that makes 11-year-old Zee Puckett stand out in nowheresville Knobb’s Ferry. She’s a storyteller, a Mary Shelley fangirl, and is being raised by her 21-year-old high school dropout sister while their father looks for work upstate (cue the wayward glances from the affluent demography). Don’t pity her, because Zee doesn’t acquiesce to snobbery, bullying, or pretty much anything that confronts her. But a dog with bleeding eyes in a cemetery gives her pause—momentarily—because the beast is just the tip of the wicked that has this way come to town. Time to get some help from ghosts. The creepy supernatural current continues throughout, intermingled with very real forays into bullying (Zee won’t stand for it or for the notion that good girls need to act nice), body positivity, socio-economic status and social hierarchy, and mental health. This debut from a promising writer involves a navigation of caste systems, self-esteem, and villainy that exists in an interesting world with intriguing characters, but they receive a flat, two-dimensional treatment that ultimately makes the book feel like one is learning a ho-hum lesson in morality. Zee is presumably White (as is her rich-girl nemesis–cum-comrade, Nellie). Her best friend, Elijah, is cued as Black. Warning: this just might spur frenzied requests for Frankenstein.
A didactic blueprint disguised as a supernatural treasure map. (Supernatural. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304460-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Another reliably eerie outing from a master of under-the-sheets reading.
Terrified children find the borders between bad dreams and reality breaking down in this stand-alone screamfest.
Stine kicks off what he dubs in his introduction an “Everything Scary Story” (inspired by eating an everything bagel) for middle graders and their parents, “who read my books when they were kids!” He throws in a cheery evil laugh—“Mmmmwahahaha…!”—before launching into a four-part story that packs a creepy old house just off Cthulhu Street that serves as the main setting with all the stuff of nightmares from his considerable arsenal. In short chapters alternating between two equally surreal storylines that may each be a dream of the other, he chucks in an impressive array of disquieting tropes and elements—ranging from spooky creaks and howls to purple worms emerging from noses, a mom who sells crocheted body parts online, teachers in “weird animal masks,” and classics like evil toys and an ominous message scrawled in blood. Even though the point-of-view characters are in a constant state of round-eyed terror, this outing is plainly meant to be in fun, and aside from being splashed with hot green vomit or spending a little time as ventriloquist’s dummies, none of the young people here suffer actual harm from the cascade of supernatural threats, for reasons the author explains at the end. The cast presents white.
Another reliably eerie outing from a master of under-the-sheets reading. (Horror. 9-12)Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9798228588301
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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