THE CURSED COIN

This middle-grade thriller finds a brother and sister tangling with an impossibly powerful coin and a gruesome stalker.

Twelve-year-old RJ walks with his younger sister one summer evening. Shelly, who’s 10, is much braver than her brother. She stops to examine something in front of a decrepit, “castle-like house” at the end of their cul-de-sac. Behind the house is a wooded cliff and a lake, in which their father, a fisherman, recently disappeared. Shelly, a collector of weird things, picks up a coin and pockets it. As they walk, she suddenly screams in pain: “The coin—my leg!” RJ then hears a strange voice whisper, “Throw it in the lake.” After he throws the coin as far onto the property as possible, Shelly reveals she was kidding. They walk home, and RJ sees what look like red eyes near the castle. Later, RJ notices a scraggly man with a sharp cane, first at the grocery store, then at his and Shelly’s lemonade stand. This is the Impaler, whose presence terrifies RJ while Mom attends an award ceremony with Ed, her scientist boyfriend. Worse, the coin reappears, this time causing bizarre sores and strange evil urges in the normally timid RJ. Now he’s determined to banish the coin to the lake. Crantz begins a series, in the vein of R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books, with this chilling blend of mystery and SF. Readers have plenty to juggle early on, primarily the true fate of the siblings’ father. The kids’ exploration of the horrid house kicks off the narrative’s second half. A few characters aren’t who they seem to be, and younger audiences will learn not to judge people by their appearances. The author effectively offers indelible images, like the Impaler, who’s “mangy and dirty like a coyote, but moved like a squid lost on land.” While the danger of the coin is entertaining, Crantz lays impressive groundwork for the series by introducing “Project: FrightVision,” which mentions other cursed objects and explains the whereabouts of Wally Swanson, a missing neighborhood child. Also noteworthy is RJ’s love of video games, which he can’t play while having his own adventures.

This gleefully macabre tale hints at a series with great potential.