A pleasing book for those who like to scare themselves silly, one to read with the lights on and the door bolted.
Two decades after his debut novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), Chbosky returns with a creepy horror yarn that would do Stephen King proud.
“Mom? Will he find us?” So asks young Christopher of his mother, Kate, who has spirited him away from her abusive mate and found a tiny town in Pennsylvania in which to hide out. Naturally, her secret is not safe—but it’s small potatoes compared to what Christopher begins to detect as he settles in to a new life and a new school. His friends, like him, are casualties, and that’s just fine for the malevolent forces that await out in the woods and even in the sky, the latter the place where Christopher comes into contact with a smiling, talking cloud that lures him off into the ever dark woods. “That’s when he heard a little kid crying,“ writes Chbosky, and that’s just about the time the reader will want to check to be sure that no one is hiding behind the chair—or worse, and about the scariest trope of all, which Chbosky naturally puts to work, under the bed. Christopher disappears only to turn up a little less than a week later, decidedly transformed. But then, so’s everyone in Mill Grove, including his elementary school teacher, who harbors an ominous thought: “Christopher was such a nice little boy. It was too bad that he was going to die now.” As things begin to go truly haywire, Chbosky’s prose begins to break down into fragments and odd punctuation and spelling, suggesting that someone other than the author is in control of the fraught world he’s depicting. One wonders why Kate doesn’t just fire up the station wagon and head down the Pennsylvania Turnpike rather than face things like a “hissing lady” and a townsman who has suddenly begun to sport daggerlike teeth, but that’s the nature of a good scary story—and this one is excellent.
A pleasing book for those who like to scare themselves silly, one to read with the lights on and the door bolted.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-3133-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
The setup is so patient and the logistics so matter-of-fact that even the savviest readers will be caught in the story’s...
The FBI hires an aging child actor to go undercover in a West Virginia prison to extract vital information from a convicted money launderer who’d rather keep his head down.
Tommy Jump’s best days onstage are probably behind him. At 27, he’s too old to play children or even teenagers. But as his old schoolmate Danny Ruiz, who’s now with the FBI, assures him, he’s not too old to earn a fat paycheck by playing the role of Peter Lenfest Goodrich, the high school history teacher who reacted to a bank’s plans to foreclose on his mortgage by robbing the bank and then getting caught. Danny is convinced that Tommy’s just the person to worm himself into the confidence of Mitchell Dupree, whose job as an executive in the Latin American division at Union South Bank was seriously compromised when he laundered millions for El Vio, the fearsome, half-blind boss of the New Colima Cartel. Mitch has a wife and two children just beginning the long wait outside for him to serve his time, and although he’s arranged for the documentary evidence he assembled against El Vio to be turned over to the authorities if anything untoward happens to him, he’s not about to upset the apple cart by talking out of turn—unless of course it’s to innocuous Pete Goodrich, who’ll be serving time alongside him in the minimum security Morgantown Prison as soon as he pleads guilty and bids a tearful farewell to Amanda Porter, Tommy’s actual fiancee, who’s just found out she’s pregnant. After all, Tommy’s been acting professionally for most of his life, and the FBI will spring him on a moment’s notice if he gets into trouble, so what could possibly go wrong? Fans of Parks’ well-oiled thrillers (Closer than You Know, 2018, etc.) won’t even bother to ask; they’ll be too busy licking their chops anticipating the twists that are bound to come.
The setup is so patient and the logistics so matter-of-fact that even the savviest readers will be caught in the story’s expertly laid traps before they know what’s happening.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4353-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Another scary winner from an accomplished pro.
The Hollows is once again a poor choice for someone trying to keep a secret in this latest thriller from best-selling author Unger (Heartbroken, 2012, etc.).
This time, it’s Sacred Heart College in the upstate New York town that attracts an unhappy outsider seeking refuge. Lana Granger remains haunted by her mother’s murder; her father, still on death row for the crime, keeps trying to make contact with her. You might wonder, given Lana’s memories of her “appalling” childhood behavior and its role in the violent dysfunction of her parents’ marriage, why she would take a job baby sitting for 11-year-old Luke, who attends a nearby school for disturbed kids and is exactly the sort of manipulative, “callous-unemotional” deemed most likely to become a full-blown psychopath by experts like Lana’s psychology professor, Langdon Hewes. But Lana feels a strange bond with Luke, and Unger skillfully ratchets up the tension as we begin to realize the boy knows far more about Lana’s past than he should, while diary entries interspersed with the main narrative document horrifying behavior by a malicious child we assume is Luke. It soon becomes clear that neither Lana nor the diary entries are what they seem, and it seems frighteningly likely that our troubled protagonist had something to do with her best friend Beck’s disappearance. But Unger pulls off a bravura feat of misdirection with Lana’s guilty secret and a terrific aha! moment with the revelation of the first of several villains, each fingered with clues carefully planted throughout the text. The book’s emotional logic isn’t as impeccable as its plotting: We’re asked to believe that one dangerously unstable child can grow up and learn to love with the help of therapy and lots of meds, while another with virtually identical issues will always be a monster. Few readers will dwell on this inconsistency as they savor the pleasure of being guided by Unger’s sure hand along a deliciously twisted narrative path.
Another scary winner from an accomplished pro.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-9117-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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