In NOS4A2, Joe Hill takes his remarkable eye for detail and applies it to a wide and expansive universe full of rich, memorable characters. The general throughline is Victoria McQueen and the discovery of inscapes. As a child, Victoria (or Brat, as her father calls her) finds out that if she rides her bike fast enough, she can make a demolished bridge appear that leads her to whatever she looking for. A fight with her parents leads her straight into trouble: a serial child abductor […]
Designed for Hollywood
In which Siege dream-casts a gripping little horror story.
Bad Decisions: the Novel
Can I just say: anyone who goes camping at a place called ‘Fear Island’ deserves anything and everything that happens to them? This includes nothing, because I know if there were a Fear Island close enough while I was in high school, I probably would have tried to get someone to go camping there with me, and I probably would have been really disappointed when nothing at all happened. This being a novel, however, something did have to happen. The third Fear Street book departs […]
The Real Surprise Wasn’t the Party
The second Fear Street book opens with a prologue from the point of view of a murderer. In this case, our killer murdered Evan for the sake of a girl, and apparently murder was quite easy. A year later, we open with Meg Dalton riding her bike with her best friend, Shannon, and her boyfriend, Tony. Evan, murdered in the Fear Street woods because people can’t die in Shadyside unless they’re located somewhere that starts with ‘Fear,’ was Shannon’s brother and Tony’s best friend. Tony […]
The One That Started It All
Here it is: the book that started it all. We open with a first person prologue from the point of view of a murderer gloating over his or her victim: Anna. I have a feeling a lot of these books are going to open this way. In the Shadyside High cafeteria, we meet Corey Brooks, a young douchebag on the gymnastics team who, despite being touted as the star gymnast, proves to be more clumsy than the average realistically flawed YA heroine. He glimpses the […]
Of Swifts and Gin (A Robert CBR6 Review)
Christopher Beale is a teacher without a school, pulled back to England after years of teaching English in a strict Muslim town in Borneo. His father has landed in a nursing home after a stroke, but Christopher still needs work. He takes on a private teaching job at the home of Lawrence and Juliet Lundy. Lawrence no longer goes to school and his mother Juliet wants a teacher to live with the family as a mentor, educator, and friend. Stephen Gregory has crafted a fine […]