The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief (Noble Publishing), by Charles Day

“One missing pumpkin certainly did not qualify as a visit from the Pumpkin Thief. But it was kind of cool, getting all worked up the night before the holiday, a special holiday devoted to celebrating evil and dead things.”

Nick seems like a pretty typical seventeen-year-old. He has a lot of trouble with the girls at school, just as much trouble with the bullies, and an annoying younger sister. He also has a fascination with mystery stories and hopes to some day become a detective. It’s his detective-like curiosity that leads Nick to do a little investigation of a local legend called the Pumpkin Thief. It all starts when the jack-o-lantern that Nick’s family had sitting on the porch steps disappears. Nick finds a paper written by a former student at his school and reads about a supposed creature that steals pumpkins throughout an entire neighborhood in order to really mess around with things and invite evil into the town. According to the legend, nobody knows where the Pumpkin Thief will strike, though the time is always around Halloween...

Nick doesn’t quite believe everything he reads at first. He has enough to worry about between all of the issues at school and outside of school. Lou, Nick’s archenemy, never seems to want to leave the kid alone, and he is completely outmatched in a fight. But when the Pumpkin Thief actually appears in the town these kids live in, there’s no better equalizer than fear.

The Legend of the Pumpkin Thief is a horror book that is written very well for its intended audience in the Young Adult crowd. One of its biggest strengths is surely the verisimilitude of high school life. It’s great that the book actually doesn’t get too bogged down in the buildup to the spooky climactic scenes; everything about Nick’s life has a chance to be fleshed out. Charles Day’s tale is just as much about being a seventeen-year-old kid with dreams as it is about horrifying creatures intent on the destruction of mankind, and that is what really makes the book in the end. The Pumpkin Thief himself is at first a complete mystery, but when he reveals himself his impact is felt in many ways. He really is a threat to the kids and everyone else in Nick’s town and they have to work together to get rid of the evil spirit.

This is a book that is a quick and enjoyable read for adults but might be just a little more entertaining for an audience that skews on the young side. Get it as a gift for the teenager who likes mysteries or a little Halloween spook.

visit the author's blog or buy the book here.

Review by Christopher Larochelle

Christopher Larochelle is buried under a huge pile of comics. At least that's his excuse for not updating his blog (where he used to write about them from time to time): www.clarocomics.blogspot.com. Visit it and encourage him to get back to updating.

The Secret of Crickley Hall

by James Herbert
Published by Macmillan

One might think that by now we’d all be tired of the standard horror tropes--vampires, zombies, demons and the like. There’s a couple of these old horror standbys that James Herbert tackles in The Secret of Crickley Hall: ghosts and the haunted house. The novel’s 633 pages seem more like half of that because the story just keeps rolling, and Herbert definitely makes the reader willing to accept these things that might seem to be stale when handled by lesser authors.

This is a story about a family that has been having some difficult times. The Caleighs move into Crickley Hall, a mysterious place in a remote part of England, when Gabe has to do a temporary engineering job. His wife, Eve, hasn’t been the same since their son went missing during a trip to a local park. There are two daughters who move into the house with them, and it isn’t long before bad things start happening all around.

Scary sounds in the middle of the night, doors opening and closing of their own volition, even things that the family starts to think that they are seeing but just aren’t sure: Crickley Hall has all the problems one might expect from a haunted house. When the Caleighs go into town to a store they find out fairly quickly that no tenant has wanted to stay at the Hall for long. A little research shows that it was once a boarding house for orphans that was under the care of siblings Augustus and Magda Cribben. The history of Crickley Hall and the Cribbens unfolds at a rapid pace and soon offers plenty of explanation for the frightening events that surround the house many decades later. Clearly the Cribbens were in the wrong line of work and their treatment of the orphans would understandably create some restless spirits.

James Herbert creates a carefully orchestrated story in The Secret of Crickley Hall. By the time the reader reaches the end, Herbert’s onomatopoetic swish-thwack! is likely to instill more than just a twinge of fear. This is a long novel, and it is still easy to digest because there is plenty of space devoted to developing well-rounded characters. Everyone has a backstory and everyone has a purpose for being in the story, making for a satisfying read that has plenty of shocks and horrors along the way. I found myself paying attention to something I usually gloss over: every chapter has a title. Some chapters are titled after characters, some are just ominous words, but all of them are meaningful and worth taking a look at. All of the plot’s loose ends are tied up nicely by the story’s end; all that the reader has to do is sit back and enjoy the work of a horror author who clearly knows how to build a heart-racing and frightening tale.

An important thing to note: if anyone thinks this is a brand new book, that’s mostly untrue. It’s been readily available in the U.K. for five years but is just making its way to an American release this week.

Buy it here.

Reviewed by Christopher Larochelle

Christopher Larochelle spends time reading comics so he can fill some digital space over at his blog all about them. The time is now post-college graduation and things are in a state of flux, but it's certain that there will always be books that need to be read and things that need to be written about. Visitors are always welcome over at www.clarocomics.blogspot.com.

The Skin Map

By Stephen R. Lawhead
Published by Thomas Nelson

Kit Livingstone is a normal enough man living in London. Everything changes quite quickly when he gets sucked into an adventure involving ley lines that are spread throughout England. Kit is torn from his mundane life by none other than his great-grandfather Cosimo, and the two set off to solve the mystery of the ley lines by finding the Skin Map, a document tattooed to a man’s body which contains all of the necessary secrets of traveling the leys.

Kit’s story is only one of several that are told in The Skin Map. One character who really starts to steal the spotlight is Kit’s girlfriend Wilhelmina. She winds up getting involved with the ley line travel (separated from her boyfriend quite unexpectedly) and is lost far in the past in an alternate-reality Prague. She meets a baker and sets up shop with him. Business doesn’t go well until she comes up with the brilliant idea of introducing coffee as a new and amazing product to the people of Prague.

Another character whose story is followed in The Skin Map is the man who wears the map on his very flesh. Arthur Flinders-Petrie is a man with secrets to keep and his own adventure adds another dimension to the novel. Instead of just hearing about the Skin Map through other characters, Lawhead lets the reader find out what the man himself was like.

At the beginning of the novel, it seems obvious that Kit is supposed to be the main character. However, as the book continues he seems to be shoved further and further away from the spotlight. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as the ensemble cast certainly propels the story forward. The villain in The Skin Map also doesn’t get nearly enough pages devoted to him. This villain, Burleigh, is some kind of master of the ley lines (as evidenced by the fact that he winds up causing problems in the multiple realities Kit, Wilhemina, Arthur, and Cosimo find themselves in), but his story must be waiting to be fleshed out in the next book in this five-novel cycle.

One thing to put in the positive column about The Skin Map is the distinctive British flavor that Lawhead brings to his work. The opening parts about Kit and his run-of-the-mill existence in London were highly entertaining. The fact that the invention/introduction of coffee to a general populace served as such an important part of the plot also came across as a deliberate stroke of humor.

Things in the negative column are fairly minor. As mentioned before, Kit’s story comes dangerously close to being drowned out by the other stories, and the pace quickens probably a little too much in the last 75 pages.

Overall, Stephen R. Lawhead’s Bright Empires series is off to an exciting start.

Buy it here.

Reviewed by Christopher Larochelle

Christopher Larochelle is a University of New Hampshire student coming close to being launched into the professional world in which he hopes to become a distinguished Writer of Stuff. He is an intern with New Hampshire Magazine, where some of his Stuff has begun to fill pages. He’s the guy with the comic book in front of his face, or the bass guitar or camera strapped around his neck, or maybe he’s at the computer typing something up for his shiny new blog here.

Red Moon

by Troy Patone
Published by Authorhouse.

Clones, cryogenics, and mutated animals: Red Moon has it all. This novel chronicles the story of Lance Longfall, a prodigy who secretly succeeds in creating the world’s first human clone. Stephen Bropalski, Lance’s best friend, often serves as the narrator in this cautionary tale about the consequences of playing god. When Lance’s lover Miranda dies in a fire at his own house, Lance vows that he will get her back. In order to do this, he must not only clone his dead girlfriend, but be frozen cryogenically so that he can meet her when the clone is old enough to be “just like Miranda.” Not surprisingly, things don’t go as expected when Lance reawakens.

Lance Longfall is a protagonist who is a little mysterious to the reader throughout the novel. The reader gets Stephen’s thoughts about Lance, and Lance never really gets to explain himself very well. Lance’s back story is intercut with the plot of the novel and fills the reader in on his hard life in a bad family. Lance is ambitious without being cruel, desperate without being hopeless and hubristic without being unaware of the dangerous game that he plays.

Red Moon is the kind of book in which you have to just shut your mind off and enjoy the ride. In the negative column, the author’s style is lacking in polish, making it hard to really dive into the tale being told. There are so many plot points that the tale starts to get simply unbelievable, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be a little bit of fun. The dual narrative of the book is a plus (some sections are straight narration and others are the recollections of a supporting character called Stephen), as was the fact that there is no “scary villain” in opposition to Lance Longfall because over the course of the novel Lance proves himself to be his own best opponent.

buy it here.

Reviewed by Christopher Larochelle

Christopher Larochelle is a University of New Hampshire student coming close to being launched into the professional world in which he hopes to become a distinguished Writer of Stuff. He is an intern with New Hampshire Magazine, where some of his Stuff has begun to fill pages. He’s the guy with the comic book in front of his face, or the bass guitar or camera strapped around his neck, or maybe he’s at the computer typing something up for his shiny new blog at http://clarocomics.blogspot.com