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Book List: Summer Scares Recommendations (Middle Grade)

With school nearly out and summer reading just around the corner, we can probably expect to see programming and suggestions from the HWA regarding their Summer Scares program.

I think it’s really cool that Summer Scares includes middle-grade fiction. Middle-grade fiction is a slippery creature. As a children’s librarian I have always identified it as what’s appropriate for and aimed at ages 8-12.  However, there are 11 and 12 year olds who are already in sixth grade, which can be elementary or middle school depending on your district, and if sixth grade is in the middle school, then MAYBE some people stretch it  a few years later. Problem is, there starts to be an overlap with YA fiction by the end of middle school, and it’s a huge developmental leap from grade 3 (yes, there are 8 year olds in third grade) to grade 6, much less to grade 8.  In my world, middle grade fiction is ages 8-12.  If I can’t put it in the elementary library, it’s not middle grade. I don’t think this is necessarily the age range the Summer Scares committee was considering, though. Kiera Parrot, one of the committee members, made some additional recommendations for middle-grade horror, which I want to share with you.

 

 

Out of the Wild Night by Blue Balliett

I am a huge fan of Blue Balliett, so when the school librarian at my kids’ middle school handed this to me and said, “You like these kinds of books, right? I just can’t get into this, would you give it a shot?” I said yes right away. I can’t begin to tell you how disappointing Out of the Wild Night was for me. Balliett does a good job of building atmosphere but it is so slow, and the plot is confusing, while the vocabulary is advanced. Only very persistent readers will push through to the end. I would love to be able to recommend this as an outstanding ghost story for middle grade students, especially as an author’s note explains that this story was very close to her heart, but there are better ones out there, and much better books by Balliett.  I did review this one in detail here.

 

Dreaming Dangerous by Lauren DeStefano

This didn’t really strike me as horror– it’s more of a science-fictiony dystopia where scientists are experimenting on children. It’s horrific that anyone would do that, but I’d call this more of a dystopian thriller. The main character, Plum, and three of her peers, have been dreaming in tandem since they were babies, and based on the way the book starts, with the kids getting blood tests and psychological testing, it’s not terribly surprising to find out that the adults in charge don’t really have the children’s best interests at heart.  Booklist  suggested this for fans of Stranger Things (which I hope is not being watched by elementary-aged kids, although I’m sure it is) but this lacks the 1980s aesthetic or realism on the show. I can see it maybe appealing to kids who liked Gathering Blue. 

 

Nightbooks by J.A. White

This is a dark, fairytale-like story both fantastic, wondrous, and frightening, perfect for the young horror lover feeling out of place. A boy on his way to destroy the scary stories he has been writing is lured into the equivalent of a gingerbread house by the promise of getting to see his favorite movie, Night of the Living Dead. He is forced to tell the witch a new scary story each night, as he tries to find a way to escape, and comes to the realization that he actually has something to be proud of, rather than something to hide. The same librarian who gave a thumbs-down to Out of the Wild Blue ran excitedly up to me with this one, saying, “You’ve gotta read this!” At that point, I already had. It’s probably one of my favorite books for any age that I’ve read this year. J. A. White is also the author of The Thickety, and we’ve reviewed a couple of the books in that series. We are fans.

 

The Girl in the Locked Room by Mary Downing Hahn

This one starts out promisingly, with a truly disorienting beginning, but I quickly started to feel like Hahn was phoning it in. As with many a ghost story (and many of Hahn’s ghost stories) a family is involved with an old house in need of repair. In this case, Dad restores old houses, Mom is an absentminded writer, and Jules is the resentful daughter who is tired of moving from place to place. The three move into a modern addition to the old house that will be their home over the course of the renovation. Jules has nothing to do except wander around. She’s pretty sure she’s seen a ghost but her only company is her skeptical parents. She makes one friend on a visit to the library, who comes to visit and investigate the old house. There’s not a lot at stake for Jules here. The ghost is silent, afraid, and in a locked room. The backstory is interesting, but while there’s tension, this isn’t something that will make the heart race. Hahn has done so much better; her previous book, Took, was much more suspenseful and definitely scarier, with better character development, even though there were many more characters and the story was more complex. Hahn has written many excellent ghost stories, including All The Lovely Bad Ones and Deep and Dark and Dangerous. Author Grady Hendrix, also on the Summer Scares committee, recommended another, older, book of Hahn’s, Wait Til Helen Comes, which is well-known as a classic children’s ghost story. Many kids in the target age range for this book will enjoy The Girl in the Locked Room, but if I had a shelf of her ghost stories to choose a recommendation from, this wouldn’t be the first one I suggested.

 

City of Ghosts by Victoria Schwab

I first encountered Victoria Schwab when we were sent her first book, The Near Witch, for review, many years back. Since then, she’s written the Shades of Magic books as V.E. Schwab, but on the cover of City of Ghosts, she is back to Victoria Schwab again. Our main character, Cassidy, fell into an icy river with her new camera and drowned a year ago, but was brought back by Jacob, a ghost, who is now her best friend. Cassidy can now cross the “Veil” and see ghosts. Her camera, altered by her fall, can capture photos of the ghosts. When Cassidy starts losing track of herself, Jacob is always with her to bring her back from beyond the Veil.

Cassidy’s parents are “ghost hunters.” One is a historian, the other is a storyteller, and while they don’t actually believe in ghosts, they do make a living writing and talking about them. Her parents are offered a “reality” show where they will travel to haunted places, tour them, and talk about them. They decide to take Cassidy with them, and their first stop is Edinburgh, in Scotland. The catacombs, cemeteries, and execution grounds they visit are not for the weak even if they can’t see ghosts, but Cassidy’s ability means we experience her panic and dread.

City of Ghosts is creepy, ominous, and at times terrifying. Schwab is great at creating atmosphere; you feel like you are in Edinburgh, especially the oppressiveness of the “haunted” areas.  It is compelling and, at times, truly scary. There’s also a mystery– clearly unsolved– that will lead to sequels I can only look forward to.

The House in Poplar Wood  by K.E. Ormsbee

Reminiscent of Tuck Everlasting, this fable/fairytale feels “out of time”.  Twin brothers Felix and Lee are the sons of the apprentices of Death and Memory, tricked by Passion into falling in love. While they live in the same house, Felix must live with his father in Death’s half of the house and Lee must live with his mother in Memory’s half of the house. Their parents are not allowed to meet or see each other. Their father can only see Felix, and their mother can only see Lee. Outside the house, the two boys can meet, but never inside. When they come of age, both boys will have to choose whether to also become apprentices or to walk away. Gretchen is the daughter of the town’s Summoner, who is responsible for keeping the balance between Death, Memory, and Passion to benefit the town. When Passion’s apprentice dies in a mysterious accident, and her father covers it up, Gretchen decides to do some detective work, and involves Felix and Lee in her schemes. Death in particular is horrific in this book, abusing his power and disciplining Felix in an abusive manner that his father is unable to act against. At heart this is a story about family, friendship, and self-determination, but with strong mythic bones that take it out of the everyday and into the universal.

 

Well, that’s all for now. I’m compiling some additional middle-grade recommendations, but this should get you, and the young readers you know, started with your summer reading!

 

 

 

 

Posted on May 29, 2019 by , 1 comment

Book Review: City of Ash and Red by Hye-Young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

City of Ash and Red by Hye-Young Pyun, translated by Sora Kim-Russell

Arcade Publishing, 2018 (English-language translation copyright), originally published by Changbi Publishers, 2010

ISBN-13: 978-1628727814

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition

 

 

City of Ash and Red has obvious similarities to the work of Franz Kafka, although it’s more brutal, violent, and stomach-turning Anonymous protagonists and locations, endless bueraucracy, mazes leading nowhere, characters seized by authority for unclear reasons, indifferent or servile characters… all of these can be found in

Kafka’s work.  However, Hye-Young Pyun’s novel personalizes her nameless protagonist, known only as “the man”, and sets him down in an apocalyptic society filled with disease, fear, garbage, brutality, and indifference. However, while this could be an issue of translation (this is not to criticize the translator, she certainly had a difficult job), City of Ash and Red lacks Kafka’s absurdism, instead using elements of his work to create an unrelenting, nightmarish situation. I have not read the author’s other work, or Korean fiction in general, in the past, so I can’t say whether this is either representative of Joon’s work or common in Korean fiction. Knowledge of Korean culture and language would almost certainly be helpful, as I’m sure her work is influenced by other Korean writers.

The protagonist has been transferred to an overseas branch of the pesticide company he works for, due to his proficiency at killing rats, in a country known only as “Country C.” (the irony of her protagonist being a vermin-killer surely is a response to Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis”) An epidemic is traveling through Country C, leaving the city in chaos, filled with trash, and sprayed regularly with clouds of toxic pesticide. On arrival, the man is quarantined due to his having a fever, then released, but when notified of this, the person responsible for his incomprehensible transfer puts him on a 10 day leave to make sure he has recovered. His suitcase stolen, the man is trapped in his apartment when his entire building is quarantined. Alienated from his coworkers, divorced from his ex-wife, and friendless, he is unable to contact or communicate with anyone in his home country to alert them to his situation, and with his cell phone missing, he has no contact information for Mol, the contact at his new place of employment. When he does finally get through to someone, he is unpleasantly surprised to learn that his ex-wife and dog were found murdered in his apartment. Afraid he will be arrested, he escapes his apartment building and becomes a homeless vagrant, with rat-killing his only useful skill, unable to contact anyone from the company he works for due to the bureaucracy it takes to get an appointment and the new procedures in place to protect people from infection. With his limited knowledge of the language, the people around him are incomprehensible, the trash-filled streets are a a maze, and a fear of infection is ever-present. The trash becomes such a problem that spraying it is not enough to control the rats, so the city starts burning the trash, leaving the ruined city covered in grey ash and red flames (in an interview, Pyun indicated that this is where the book’s title came from). It becomes impossible to tell whether what is going on in his mind is reality, paranoia, or both.

The man’s skill at rat-killing gets him recruited as an exterminator and offers him a little more stability and protection, but as a paranoid, violent, and alienated individual, it’s not clear that this is a good thing. His continued attempts to communicate with anyone through public telephones are failures (interestingly, the word for public telephones in Korean can also be read as “midair”, a nuance that is lost in translation) and as the people of the city adapt to their new reality, he adopts the name Mol (a Chinese character that means “to disappear”, another nuance lost in translation), finally resigning himself to a daily life of futility, loneliness, and meaninglessness, running in circles or hiding in the shadows, like a rat.

It’s to her credit that Hye-Young Pyun is actually able to make her protagonist at all sympathetic, mostly through flashbacks that document his unfair treatment by his coworkers and distance from his wife, and the frustrations and fears that readers themselves may have of such things as being seized by the government, abandoned in an unfamiliar location, robbed, and deprived of the ability to communicate. While it may be unclear as to whether the protagonist killed his ex-wife, it is clearly stated that he raped her and put her in an abusive situation, and he is responsible for the brutal death of at least one other person in addition to the gory details of his rat-killing. Thankfully, Pyun chose to write as a distant, third-person narrator instead of from the protagonist’s point of view. As someone with a particular revulsion to rats (thanks to George Orwell’s terrifying rat scene in 1984) this made the book really difficult for me to finish.

City of Ash and Red goes far beyond Kafka’s existentialist dystopias, and pulls the reader into a more horrific and gruesome arena. Despite his namelessness, I just can’t interpret the protagonist an “everyman”, unless the author’s point is that regardless of what we think of ourselves, we all are terrible people, each of us both victims and victimized, and lost to each other (I refuse to be that pessimistic). If you’re looking for a fast-paced, action-packed narrative, you will want to look elsewhere, but while I disliked the main character and what he represented, Pyun is a talented and effective writer whose vivid descriptions create a compelling, if terrible, world, and for those who have a strong stomach and a liking for dystopian fiction, this is a book you won’t want to miss. Recommended.

Contains: rape, murder, violence, gore, burning people alive, animal killing

 

Editor’s note: For a little more information on Hye-Young Pyun, click here.

 

 

Posted on April 30, 2019 by , Reply

Book Review: Inspection by Josh Malerman

Inspection by Josh Malerman

Del Rey, 2019

ISBN-13: 978-1524796990

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Hot on the heels of the biggest Netflix movie of all time, Bird Box, Josh Malerman is poised to continue his climb to stardom in this stellar new novel, a strange story that takes a left turn through the woods of Michigan instead of following a well-trodden road.

For anyone who has read him, Malerman a refreshing read because he eschews the normal, refusing  to follow formula: he entertains  readers. as well as forcing them to think. Bird Box, Malerman’s first novel, has been followed by Black Mad Wheel (music was the antagonist, allegedly), Goblin (a connected set of stories), and Unbury Carol (a western/horror/romance),

Inspection may remind some of 1984 or The Giver. The premise is that two towers exist in the forest, each just barely out of sight of the other. Within each, 26 students are raised from birth, given names of simply letters. The Alphabet Boys. The Letter Girls.  Neither is aware the other sex exists. The leaders of the experiment, D.A.D. and M.O.M., train their prodigies in several subjects, the arts, and more, honing the twelve-year-olds for mysterious lives.

The initial sections force the reader to push past the typical storytelling format, as the characters and setting require an intricate set up. Assigning each student only a letter for a name accomplishes both identity and sameness, the reason of which will reveal itself in layers. The schooling and activities impressed upon the students are mindbending and brutal: bizarre games and social events that twist in logic and morality.

J suspects something exists beyond the borders of his world when he sees a shadowy figure beyond a tree in the yard. It sends him on a journey that will alter him in ways he never thought possible, changing how he views his compartmentalized world. When a strange book lands on the students’ beds one day, one that reveals the truths about life outside of the school, the walls begin to crumble and terror of a new kind creeps into the students’ lives, one that could send them to “the corner,” a place from where no one has ever returned.

K embarks on a similar path, one that will bring her to a world she never knew existed.

Inspection will challenge readers. The result of Malerman’s story is a rewarding psychological journey that is guaranteed to garner him new readers and please his fans. His examination of the human condition, and of the “nature vs. nurture” debate, is relevant to the educational system and parenting today’s youth.

Finding a genre that fits this story will be a tough task, but one that should be determined by each reader. Inspection is destined to become one of the most talked about novels of 2019– and  it should be. Recommended.

 

Reviewed by Dave Simms

Posted on March 19, 2019 by , Reply
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