Sample book reviews from The Washington Post and The New York Times
Review: Goosebumps author writes a horror novel where the kids aren’t the
good guys
“Hey, look, the Goosebumps guy is out with a new book! Perhaps the kids would like it for
Christmas...”
Umm, no.
Red Rain may have some tropes in common with R.L. Stine’s best-selling series of scary books
for children, but the audience here is clearly readers who enjoy the likes of Stephen King and
Dean Koontz. Villainous lawn gnomes and ventriloquist dummies are replaced by real people
who cause real pain.
The horror is grisly. Stine likes food metaphors to convey the gore: Windpipes ripped out of
throats like “some kind of long pasta noodle.” A young woman holding her intestines as “a
gusher of pink and yellow sausage” oozes through her fingers.
It’s not really spoiling any suspense to say Stine has flipped his Goosebumps formula and made
the kids the villains instead of the good guys. When twin 12-year-old boys Samuel and Daniel
are adopted by a travel writer after a deadly hurricane off the South Carolina coast, there are
ominous signs that all is not well with the “bruvvers.” Readers understand something’s amiss
immediately, even if it takes the book’s characters awhile.
It’s a page turner until the end, with short chapters that help increase the pace. Stine enjoys
himself writing not for kids but about them.
For parents, there’s plenty here to keep you up at night. Stine deftly makes one of his characters
a child psychologist whose questions mirror our own: How much freedom of choice should kids
have? When do they deserve to be treated like adults? And if you suspect they’re up to no good
with their friends, how quickly should you step in?
Quicker than they do in this wicked little book, that’s for sure.
Review: David Wong’s ‘This Book Is Full of
Spiders’: Touch it and read it
“This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It” (Thomas Dunne Books), by
David Wong
David Wong wakes up with a horrific spiderlike creature biting his leg that only he can see. In
“This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It,” the nightmare is just beginning
for Wong. The story is told primarily from his point of view, and it’s not clear right away if what
he’s seeing is real or if it’s in his twisted imagination.
Wong is also listed as the author of the book, and that adds an extra level of madness to the
proceedings. The author is Jason Pargin, senior editor and columnist for Cracked.com, a humor
website. The comedic and crackling dialogue also brings a whimsical flair to the story, making it
seem like an episode of AMC’s “The Walking Dead” written by Douglas Adams of “The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”
The novel is a sequel to “John Dies at the End,” but Wong tells readers on the first page of
“Spiders” not to bother with the first book because a fresh start is better.
The spider that bites Wong continues to attack him, and he’s lucky not to be taken over by this
parasiticlike creature. A cop shows up and ends up consumed by the monster. Soon other people
in the town begin showing signs of being controlled and Wong can see millions of the spiders
everywhere. He asks his friend, John, and his girlfriend, Amy, for help in stopping the madness.
Mysterious portals to the women’s underwear section of Wal-Mart, soy sauce and a strange
therapist add to the mix.
Imagine a mentally ill narrator describing the zombie apocalypse while drunk, and the end result
is unlike any other book of the genre.
Seriously, dude, touch it and read it.
Running the Asylum
‘The Devil in Silver,’ by Victor LaValle
By JOE HILL
Published: October 5, 2012
Victor LaValle’s publishers have made the curious decision to market his third novel, “The
Devil in Silver,” as a horror thriller. But it doesn’t really fit either part of that label; it isn’t
much interested in making your pulse race, and it won’t scare the pants off anyone. It’s
simply too bighearted, too gentle, too kind, too culturally observant and too idiosyncratic to
squash into the small cupboard of any one genre, or even two.
LaValle leads his readers to the New Hyde mental hospital, a shabby urban Bedlam in
Queens, shoves them in and locks the door behind them for 400 pages. For company we
have Pepper — a big, lonely loser with all the impulse control of your average preschooler —
and the other inmates, a drugged-out collection of the unwell, unloved and unwanted: poor
people with emotional problems that no one wants to think about, let alone treat. There’s
also a geriatric Minotaur locked behind a silver door, a beast the patients believe might be
Old Harry himself.
But when it comes to creating suffering, the Devil can’t begin to compete with a
nonfunctioning mental health care system, too underfunded and unaccountable to do
anyone any good. LaValle explores the way New Hyde’s patients are routinely doped up,
locked down and abused (by one another and the staff), all while refusing to demonize any
one cog in a machine that grinds up anyone unlucky enough to be fed into it. Doing well by
these people isn’t in the larger social interest. In times of austerity, the last thing anyone
wants to do is throw a bunch of money at an agency that can’t offer a return on the
taxpayer’s investment.
Or, as Pepper’s doctor puts it: “A wise man once said that every system is designed to give
you the results you actually get. . . . This system is working.”
“For some people,” Pepper retorts.
“Wrong,” the doctor tells him. “The system is working exactly right for those it was intended
for. That’s why it hasn’t been fixed. Because it isn’t broken!”
Like police departments, schools and a variety of other government services, New Hyde has
the misfortune — an unforgivable one, in today’s society — of not being designed to produce
a profit. Call it the original American sin. Indeed, LaValle’s fellowship of the mistreated and
the mentally ill is only a stand-in for a much larger slice of inconvenient America. “Maybe
this is the world,” one old tenant of New Hyde bluntly says. “If you think about it, what’s so
different? Wake up in the morning, eat some breakfast, take a few pills to start the day. Go
to a conference room and waste time. Go to lunch, take a few more pills. . . . Eat dinner
while you watch TV. Take a few more pills and go to bed. Isn’t that how most people are
living? It’s been a while since I was outside, but that’s what the news is always saying.
Maybe out there is a lot like in here.”
So what about the monster behind the silver door? For Pepper and his makeshift family of
the mad, getting even with the demon comes to seem more important than their own
recovery or their possible return to the world beyond New Hyde. It is, LaValle suggests,
easier to live an unhappy life when you have a handy demon upon which to focus your
despair and rage; easier than trying to wrestle with the conditions that led to that unhappy
life in the first place. In this regard, everyone loves the Devil.
Foreign Bodies
‘Pure,’ Julianna Baggott’s Dystopian Novel
By CLARE CLARK
Published: February 24, 2012
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Sometime in the unspecified future, a series of detonations has all but destroyed the world.
A handpicked few were given refuge in the Dome, a high-tech bubble designed to withstand
environmental disaster. Those left outside were not so fortunate. The intensity of the
explosions not only devastated the landscape but changed forever those who survived it,
fusing people with animals, with objects, with the earth. The lucky ones can still function.
One young man has a slavering dog instead of a leg and has “learned how to walk with a
quick, uneven limp.” Another has several birds embedded in his back, their wings moving
under his shirt. Some types are common enough to have been given names: the Groupies,
drunk and vicious, have been bound into one massive body, while the feral Beasts are half
man, half animal. The Dusts are barely human at all, monsters who have bonded to rocks
and rubble, and who drag themselves out of the ground like living land mines to devour any
creature that strays too close.
Pressia is a beautiful, almond-eyed survivor who lives with her grandfather in a ruined
barbershop. The Detonations hit when she was only 6, killing her Japanese mother, and
now, besides the crescent scar around her left eye, she has a doll’s head instead of a right
hand. In a few days’ time, on her 16th birthday, Pressia will be claimed by the OSR — once
the search and rescue organization put together to aid survivors, now a paramilitary force
that terrorizes the ravaged city. She will be “untaught to read” and either trained as a killer
or, if her deformations are too debilitating, used for target practice. Her grandfather has
built her a hiding place in a cabinet in the barbershop through which she can escape when
the OSR comes knocking, but escape to where? Though there are rumors of an underground
network that helps runaways, no one knows for sure. In the bombed-out dystopia of Julianna Baggott’s “Pure” — the first book of a projected trilogy — no one ever comes back.
Meanwhile, life in the Dome has its own privations. The younger inhabitants, known as
Pures because of their unblemished bodies, are being subjected to a series of “codings,”
devised to enhance their physical capabilities and suppress potentially rebellious behavior.
Partridge, however, despite being the son of a primary architect of the Dome, does not take
well to reprogramming. Oppressed by the claustrophobic regime, distanced from his cold
father and grieving for his dead brother, he comes to believe that his mother, who he has
been told is dead, may still be living on the outside. Determined to find her, he plots his
escape. Beyond the Dome he meets Pressia, who saves him from marauding Groupies, and
they decide to join forces.
The film rights to “Pure” have already been sold, with a “Twilight” producer on board, and
it’s not hard to see why. Baggott’s postapocalyptic world is realized to stunning cinematic
effect, from the roofless barbershop (where “three combs float in a dust-covered glass tube
filled with old cloudy blue water like they’re suspended in time”) to the Meltlands, onetime
suburbs where children’s plastic jungle gyms have liquefied into violently colored blobs like
“warped sculptures,” and the Deadlands, where the Dusts rise up to attack the living,
“bringing with them what seems to be a hem of the earth.” The fused and melded bodies of
what the elite in the Dome call the “wretches” are each small chilling works of imaginative
art. From the stranger’s hand with its embedded keypad to the OSR operative whose
younger brother is bonded to his back from the waist down in a “permanent piggyback ride,”
they speak directly to the technological wizardry of C.G.I. and 3-D.
Pressia too is a heroine for the video game age. Unlike Winston Smith — the flawed hero of
George Orwell’s “1984,” who in the end is defeated by an omnipotent state — Pressia is a
manga heroine straight out of a comic book. Fearless, spirited, unflinching, she does not
have it in her to act dishonorably. When faced with a dying boy caught in an agonizing trap,
she cannot kill him, though her failure to do so may result in her own death. She admits to
occasional weaknesses — she expresses a shameful fondness for the stylish OSR uniform,
with a down jacket that feels “like walking inside warm risen bread” — but these are fleeting
and never threaten her fundamental virtue. Her certainty and fortitude reflect the hopes of
all adolescents who might ever find themselves in her situation, that if tested they would not
be found wanting.
The other teenage heroes are hardly more fallible. Partridge and Bradwell, the survivor son
of revolutionary parents, might have moments of moodiness, but both are brave and
steadfast, their instincts always true. The three of them bicker convincingly — Baggott has a
sharp ear for the swagger and the vulnerability of adolescence — but their moral compass is
unwavering. There is good and there is evil, black and white. There is never any doubt about
whose side we are on.
The great dystopian novels extrapolate from the ominous elements of contemporary society
to a sinister, unchecked future, but “Pure” does not concern itself with a political context for
its apocalypse. The Dome, and perhaps the Detonations too, are seemingly the brainchild of
a handful of evil masterminds, Partridge’s father among them, whose motivation may be the
creation of a master race. It hardly matters. This is an apocalypse for a generation on the
cusp of adulthood, who must choose between the authoritarian Dome, where safety comes
at the price of parental tyranny, and the dark and dangerous wastelands of the world
beyond, where, in pursuit of their freedom, they must face their greatest fears. The ordinary
struggles of survival — food, sleep, sanitation — are of only passing concern. Adults have
destroyed the planet. Now their children must battle for its redemption. This is a postapocalyptic narrative that owes at least as much to fairy tale and myth as it does to science
fiction.
The result is an old-fashioned adventure story that zips along at a brisk pace, the “Mad Max”
landscape creating the backdrop for a succession of violent confrontations in which the
stakes are satisfyingly high. What lifts “Pure” from the glut of blood-spattered young adult
fiction is not the story Baggott tells but the exquisite precision of her prose. Late in the
novel, a character remarks that despite the grotesque deformities of the survivors, “there’s
beauty in their scars and fusings because they are signs of their survival, which is a beautiful
thing, if you think about it.” Baggott can find a kind of beauty even in the woman whose
pearl necklace, now part of her skin, resembles “a strand of perfectly shaped tumors.” This
novel may score more highly for entertainment than edification, but it is a treasury of such
images, discomfiting and unforgettable.