The buildup is leisurely by current standards, but the cast and plot offer a seamless fit into the classic series.
The cast of John Bellairs’ classic Johnny Dixon series is resurrected for a creepy new story with contemporary elements.
Strickland’s tale is set in the mid-1950s—with telephones on cords, black-and-white TVs, doctors making house calls, and other period details—but in the midst of a more timely feeling flu pandemic and general shutdown. Johnny, with friends Sarah Channing and Fergie Ferguson plus, of course, crusty Professor Childermass, faces a sorcerer seeking power over a shadow realm as well as eerie manifestations ranging from glimpses of spectral figures and a horribly distorted face in the window to a midday spell of townwide darkness. The members of the all-White cast, from methodical Johnny and competent Sarah on, remain true to type, and Bellairs fans will also find the way the author slows the pacing with references to the professor’s culinary treats, what everyone is wearing or eating, conversations about this epidemic and the one in 1918, and like minor details to be quaintly reminiscent of the original series. Still, along with ciphered messages to decode, old legends of a local woman who could foretell events, characters with secrets, and nighttime expeditions to a Colonial-era graveyard, the author tucks in increasingly macabre visions and incidents on the way to a climactic supernatural struggle over a certain grave and a suitably spooky fate for the villain.
The buildup is leisurely by current standards, but the cast and plot offer a seamless fit into the classic series. (Horror. 12-14)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781504081634
Page Count: 167
Publisher: Open Road Media
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
In an unnamed country (a thinly veiled Philippines), three teenage boys pick trash for a meager living. A bag of cash in the trash might be—well, not their ticket out of poverty but at least a minor windfall. With 1,100 pesos, maybe they can eat chicken occasionally, instead of just rice. Gardo and Raphael are determined not to give any of it to the police who've been sniffing around, so they enlist their friend Rat. In alternating and tightly paced points of view, supplemented by occasional other voices, the boys relate the intrigue in which they're quickly enmeshed. A murdered houseboy, an orphaned girl, a treasure map, a secret code, corrupt politicians and 10,000,000 missing dollars: It all adds up to a cracker of a thriller. Sadly, the setting relies on Third World poverty tourism for its flavor, as if this otherwise enjoyable caper were being told by Olivia, the story's British charity worker who muses with vacuous sentimentality on the children that "break your heart" and "change your life." Nevertheless, a zippy and classic briefcase-full-of-money thrill ride. (Thriller. 12-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-75214-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: David Fickling/Random
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end.
Riggs spins a gothic tale of strangely gifted children and the monsters that pursue them from a set of eerie, old trick photographs.
The brutal murder of his grandfather and a glimpse of a man with a mouth full of tentacles prompts months of nightmares and psychotherapy for 15-year-old Jacob, followed by a visit to a remote Welsh island where, his grandfather had always claimed, there lived children who could fly, lift boulders and display like weird abilities. The stories turn out to be true—but Jacob discovers that he has unwittingly exposed the sheltered “peculiar spirits” (of which he turns out to be one) and their werefalcon protector to a murderous hollowgast and its shape-changing servant wight. The interspersed photographs—gathered at flea markets and from collectors—nearly all seem to have been created in the late 19th or early 20th centuries and generally feature stone-faced figures, mostly children, in inscrutable costumes and situations. They are seen floating in the air, posing with a disreputable-looking Santa, covered in bees, dressed in rags and kneeling on a bomb, among other surreal images. Though Jacob’s overdeveloped back story gives the tale a slow start, the pictures add an eldritch element from the early going, and along with creepy bad guys, the author tucks in suspenseful chases and splashes of gore as he goes. He also whirls a major storm, flying bullets and a time loop into a wild climax that leaves Jacob poised for the sequel.
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end. (Horror/fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59474-476-1
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
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