Fans of the movie may enjoy it.
A demon catches four young teens on Halloween, intending to turn them into monsters.
This middle-grade series kickoff features teens Beth, Kellen, Luke, and Nicole, white except for Asian-American Nicole. Kellen yearns for childhood friend Beth, Nicole seems to have a crush on Kellen, and Luke cares only about cracking jokes. ’Tis the season, and Dr. Hysteria arrives in town with his Hall of Horrors, supposedly holiday entertainment for the town. But Beth takes a wrong turn inside the attraction and realizes that the monsters are real. When she stumbles on the titular cabinet, she finds not only a girl who went missing a year ago from another town, but also many others, some in historical clothing. She realizes that Dr. Hysteria is a demon and that he has trapped her friends…and perhaps also has trapped her. Adapting the book from the screenplay for the 2015 film R.L. Stine’s Monsterville: The Cabinet of Souls, Ferguson keeps the creep factor high and the originality factor low. Befitting its status as a movie tie-in, the book contains glossy photos of the characters in a four-page inset. While the story starts with some unrequited romance, it quickly begins to focus on suspense and horror, with beautiful, blonde Beth as the star trying to save herself and her friends.
Fans of the movie may enjoy it. (Horror. 8-12)Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-338-03252-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
A decent-enough adventure, but not one for the ages.
Marty and Grace return for their third rare-animal adventure (Tentacles, 2009, etc.).
Thirteen-year-old cousins Grace and Marty were separated at the end of their last adventure. Grace agreed to leave with her grandfather, Dr. Noah Blackwood, even though she knows he is not the wildlife conservationist he pretends to be on his television show. Marty stayed with Grace’s father (and his uncle), Dr. Travis Wolfe, world-renowned cryptozoologist. When Wolfe leaves them alone, Marty and his best friend, Luther, decide to try to find Grace at Dr. Blackwood’s Seattle Ark, one of his chain of zoos. With the help of a new friend, Luther and Marty sneak into the Ark and begin searching for Grace. Blackwood discovers that the boys are on the property, but he can’t pinpoint them; likewise, the boys find the secret research lab beneath the Ark, but they can’t get to it. Everything is complicated by Blackwood’s genetically created chupacabra, a legendary cryptid and voracious monster loose in the lab’s ductwork. Smith’s third in a series of four adventures stands alone well enough, but it works best as part of the series (a helpful recap of the series thus far orients readers to its labyrinthine twists). The adventure sequences are entertaining, but some of the humor may strike kids as rather lame; the ever-hungry Luther’s antics especially ring false.
A decent-enough adventure, but not one for the ages. (Adventure. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-17817-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
A heroine to warm the heart and a mystery to chill the blood.
A young zombie enthusiast tries to bring about the apocalypse and uncovers a murder plot instead in Wyatt’s middle-grade debut.
Harriet the Spy meets Coraline in this horror romp starring almost-13-year-old Ernestine Montgomery. Intent on jump-starting the apocalypse and with a zombie survival guide already written, Ernestine, with the help of her white stepbrother Charleston, tries to raise the undead from a nearby cemetery. Plans are derailed a bit, however, with the attempted murder of their landlady, and the eccentric, “retired artists, both performing and otherwise” who share their apartment building are thrown under suspicion. Wyatt has created a bright, determined, and emotionally complex protagonist to join the illustrious roster of young mystery-solvers and monster-slayers: Ernestine barely blinks when tracking down a would-be homicidal maniac is added to her apocalyptic to-do list. Past trauma, a delicate mother-daughter relationship, and premeditated violence bring a balance of gravitas to the delightfully macabre narrative without slowing it down. Wyatt makes some awkward missteps in representation, overemphasizing the hair textures—and misbehavior—and skin tones of biracial Ernestine and her mother in comparison to brief eye- and hair-color descriptions for white characters such as Charleston. Despite this, the narrative will have readers asking for the sure-to-come sequel.
A heroine to warm the heart and a mystery to chill the blood. (Mystery. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-47158-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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