A skeleton with no meat to speak of.
A cursed landmark complicates the lives of four teenagers.
An abandoned Western film set lies in the middle of the Arizona desert. Narrator Alex and his friends live nearby, on Edmonds Air Force Base, and they’ve heard the stories. Everyone who worked on the set back in the 1980s, when it burned down, was cursed, and it’s still active, inflicting “eternal bad luck” on anyone who enters. But Alex’s friend Gabby is a budding movie nerd, and she’s itching to check it out. After a creepy expedition to the site, bad luck plagues the group of friends, and it’s up to them to break the curse. The tale moves from story beat to story beat with little fuss and no padding. Unfortunately, the author speeds along so fast that character work gets left behind, with the result that nobody has a particularly individual voice. Aside from the Islamophobia endured by pal Ahmed, the story sticks to Main Street to its own detriment. When there’s no emotional involvement in characters, there’s little reason to worry whether they’ll make it to the end in one piece. Alex and Gabby are Latino, and the base is realistically multicultural. Three other entries in the Atlas of Cursed Places series publish simultaneously: Deadman Anchor, Radioactive, and Skeleton Tower.
A skeleton with no meat to speak of. (Horror. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5124-1351-9
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Darby Creek
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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SEEN & HEARD
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones.
An exhilarating summer marked by death, gore and fire sparks deep thoughts in a small-town lad not uncoincidentally named “Jack Gantos.”
The gore is all Jack’s, which to his continuing embarrassment “would spray out of my nose holes like dragon flames” whenever anything exciting or upsetting happens. And that would be on every other page, seemingly, as even though Jack’s feuding parents unite to ground him for the summer after several mishaps, he does get out. He mixes with the undertaker’s daughter, a band of Hell’s Angels out to exact fiery revenge for a member flattened in town by a truck and, especially, with arthritic neighbor Miss Volker, for whom he furnishes the “hired hands” that transcribe what becomes a series of impassioned obituaries for the local paper as elderly town residents suddenly begin passing on in rapid succession. Eventually the unusual body count draws the—justified, as it turns out—attention of the police. Ultimately, the obits and the many Landmark Books that Jack reads (this is 1962) in his hours of confinement all combine in his head to broaden his perspective about both history in general and the slow decline his own town is experiencing.
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-37993-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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