Invites imaginations to run wild with petrifying preternatural possibilities.
A short story collection framed by the tale of a boy who catches the wrong train.
In this British import, a boy runs to catch his train only to find that he’s gotten on the wrong one. In a panic, he gets off at the lonely first stop. While he waits for the return train, an old man and his dog join the boy, and the old man decides to keep the boy company and entertain him with stories. After the first horror story, the boy has had enough, but the man pushes forward with more, and the boy, stuck in the dark, has no choice but to listen. The eerie, atmospheric setup will likely deter those who do not enjoy horror, and should that fail, the twist at the end of the first story will, leaving the rest of the book for connoisseurs of the genre. The supernatural horrors range in subject matter (monsters, haunted cars, and a whole menagerie of dreamlike impossibilities) as well as in length, structure (single-scene vignettes and traditional stories), and back story (with many resolutions simply unexplainable but unpleasant—don’t expect any happy endings here). In between, the boy and the man talk—these launch pads for the stories get quite repetitive, but the framing device comes into play for one last twist. Physical and racial descriptors are generally absent.
Invites imaginations to run wild with petrifying preternatural possibilities. (Short stories/horror. 10-14)Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-338-12125-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: David Fickling/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Ebulliently original.
Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world?
Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, "being albino made the sun my enemy," and she has only enemies at school. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Though Sunny's initiative is thin—she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults—the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving).
Ebulliently original. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01196-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
Promising elements aplenty, but they never fully mesh or deliver more than a passing chill.
Cryptic clues in a Web comic put a Seattle teenager onto the trail of a deranged kidnapper and his victim.
Three years after the (supposed) drowning of bosom friend Libby, 16-year-old May is shocked to see new stickers and other merch for “Princess X,” an intrepid swordswoman in a puff-sleeved dress and sneakers that she and Libby had privately invented in fifth grade. The princess’s recently posted online adventures tell a scary tale about escaping from a “Needle Man” years after being stolen as a replacement for his own dead daughter. They leave May convinced that Libby is still alive—hiding out from her clever, relentless captor and imbedding veiled messages in the comic that only May would catch. Said hints lead May and Trick, a hacker dude she goes to for help, on a quest through the city’s seedier and underground quarters to encounters with Jackdaw (a gay, goth Robin Hood) and a desperate scheme to steal proof of the Needle Man’s perfidy. Priest cranks the suspense somewhat by casting the kidnapper as both an IT expert and a killer, but because he mostly appears only in the emotionally charged, sparely drawn purple-and-black comics pages that Ciesemier scatters through the tale’s first two-thirds, he remains, at best, a shadowy bogeyman.
Promising elements aplenty, but they never fully mesh or deliver more than a passing chill. (Thriller. 11-14)Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-62085-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Levine/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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