“Lubar strikes again. Another winning round-up.“

That is the review blurb on the cover of Invasion of the Road Weenies, courtesy of Booklist. Apparently Booklist’s bar is so low you have to be careful not to trip over it.

Before I get started, I take back everything I said about RL Stine, and I owe him an apology.

I almost want to say this book is a testament to how un-spooky modern spooky anthologies have become, but I’m not sure how “creepy” it was actually intended to be. I don’t know what this book is, or how it came to be. Unfinished stories assembled into an anthology because the author couldn’t think of what else to do with them, nor could he be bothered to finish any of them? A collection of lazy stories written by an author who thinks his young reader base is stupid? A spooky portmanteau that could have been great, but was butchered by the editor?

If someone took Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs and pulled out all its teeth, Invasion of the Road Weenies is exactly what you’d be left with. It touts itself as a collection of weird and creepy tales, but the title and the cover art beg to differ. In fact, that silly and eye-rolling imagery is truer to the book’s content than the subtitle. The book has to be meant as a creepy anthology, or it wouldn’t advertise itself as such…yet it misses the mark right out of the gate, and like the titular road weenies, keeps it going until the final stretch.

The stories inside this book quite literally read like first drafts: they’re filled with lazy passages devoid of any clever metaphors and apt description, even for a book intended for kids. What isn’t rushed, is as bland as possible. Weird story elements come out of left field with no feasible explanation or foreshadowing. Everything is “tell, don’t show” from start to finish: it’s rare when any story element is actually fleshed out. Characters change their minds and motivations on a dime for no reason, or become dirt stupid in order for the plot to happen. The narrative breaks Mark Twain’s rule of, “Use the right word, not its second cousin” on a regular basis: basketballs break rather than burst, branches tear rather than snap. Worst of all, Lubar occasionally tosses in a ham-fisted social commentary that’s every bit as uninspired as the narrative spelling it out.

The really frustrating part is that most of these stories aren’t bad conceptually. There are some fun ideas here, but David Lubar can’t commit to a single one of them. He jots them down as quickly as he comes up with them, then moves on to the next one. Or maybe they were better in their original forms–maybe even brilliant–and some corporate editor and her lawyers whitewashed the personality and tension and flavor out of every last one. I have personal experience with this, so it’s entirely possible, but after reading the appendix about the inspiration for each story, I’m inclined to believe the former.

I try not to be totally unfair when reviewing things. There were a couple moments reading this book where I actually enjoyed myself a little. With a bit more polish, The Dead Won’t Hurt You would be right at home in a QL Pearce horror anthology; A Tiny Little Piece is a hilarious morality play; and Fresh from the Garden, while typically slow and bland to start, has a bang-up second half that is all kinds of twisted. It’s just a shame the rest of the stories weren’t as well-realized as those three, and even that isn’t saying a whole lot. They still would benefit from further edits (or any edits). I would pay out of pocket to see RC Welch rewrite this entire anthology in his own twisted style. It would be a riot.

As it stands, I award this book the monkey-at-the-typewriter. Whatever vampiric element sucked the life out of these stories, be it in conception or post-birth, the end result is the same: a bland, unsatisfying, even cringey anthology with a few seeds of fun buried deep in its mire of boredom. There are maybe two or three stories our of the 35 tales in this book that are enjoyable. The rest are a waste of potential and make the entire collection not worth your time, unless you’re looking for an example of how not to write weird and spooky stories for kids. The book claims it is written for ages 10 and up, and I’m inclined to disagree. Most of the books I review on this site are for that age range, and none of them talk down to their reader base as much as this book does.

Lubar has published dozens of anthologies just like this. I have to wonder how good his stories would be if he stopped long enough to actually develop one of them.

I’m almost dreading this part of the article, where I summarize each individual story and share my two cents on them. Normally I try to come up with a moral or lesson for each, but this time I’m doing something different. This time I’m highlighting a stand-out passage from each story, either to better illustrate my beef with the anthology, or to highlight the rare case of good writing.

The Last Halloween

SUMMARY: Jennifer has second thoughts about going trick-or-treating this year because last year she was held up by bullies who stole all her candy. When she finds her late grandmother’s old veil and gloves, she decides to go anyway as some weird veiled lady. She gets lots of candy, but then a group of older kids accosts her and plans to steal it from her. That’s when the gloves grow claws and cut up the bullies’ clothes and candy bags. The bullies run away, and Jennifer decides she’ll use the same costume next Halloween.

MY THOUGHTS: I like the idea of thieving Halloween candy bullies getting their comeuppance, but there’s zero reason given for why Grammy’s gloves have Wolverine claws in them. Lubar could have gone with a death mask embodying the spirit of her grandma, or Jennifer could have weaponized her costume herself deliberately in case the bullies turned up again this year. Instead, the gloves just randomly have claws in them for this “special night.” As a result her retribution isn’t as satisfying: it’s handed to her by a deus ex machina.

BEST LINE: The title. “Last Halloween” would suggest the main character’s Halloween beef from the previous year. Adding “The” to the title implies it is the final Halloween, which this clearly isn’t, because Jennifer plans to go trick-or-treats again next year. So the title makes no sense.

Bed Tings

SUMMARY: Pauli’s grandma has a strong accent that makes her hard to understand. Pauli claims that she has a common saying, “Bed tings heppen in treeze,” which Pauli translates to, “Bad things happen in threes.” So when the narrator has three mishaps in a row, he’s emboldened to climb a tree to recover his kite, since there’s no way he’d fall and break his neck. That would be four bad things. Grammy keeps shouting this phrase at the narrator while he climbs the tree, and when a branch breaks and sends the kid falling, he realizes she literally meant, “trees.”

MY THOUGHTS: Go read “The Slithering Corpse” (in Twisted Tales) or “Dead Letter Office” (in More Super-Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs) for better examples of stories that hinge on a misunderstanding. This one you can see coming from a mile away, and the worst that happens to this kid is a broken leg, which he doesn’t seem all that broken up about (bdum-tshh). Also, narrator goes from outright dismissing Grammy’s statement as a silly superstition to being a fanatical believer at the drop of a hat for no reason. Because young readers don’t need stories that make sense! They’re dumb!

I used to have old cassette tapes of the Mister Men books, including Mr Silly. Every time Mr Silly did something ridiculous, it was followed by the narrator’s crazy voice going, “Izzen that SILLY?!” A bunch of stories in Road Weenies, including this one, end on such a womp-womp dopey joke note that I instantly hear that line in my head.

BEST LINE: The branch I was standing on tore from the tree with a splintering scream. I fell. Also letting out a splintering scream.

I don’t know what a “splintering scream” is, in regards to branches nor people.

The Dead Won’t Hurt You

SUMMARY: Eric is deadly scared of dead things, so naturally he’s accepted a dare to walk through the cemetery at night with his pals. One by one said pals chicken out and desert him, but he’s so close to finishing the dare he decides to see it through. Eric is so scared of the dead he didn’t even go to his classmate Henry’s funeral when he died tragically, and always felt bad about not getting to know him better. Eric bumps into a strange man in the cemetery who then gives chase and tries to murder him, but the man trips and bashes his head open on a gravestone. Eric sees evidence that it was Henry’s dead hand that tripped the maniac and saved him.

MY THOUGHTS: One of the few stories in this collection that I actually liked. The guy who chases Eric is pretty scary when he first shows up, acting harmless at first but quickly making it obvious he means to do terrible things to the boy. Eric’s guilt about not coming to Henry’s funeral is a good setup for Henry’s revenant coming to Eric’s rescue. The trip through the cemetery is spooky and atmospheric. It deserves to be in a much better anthology, like one of the Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs.

BEST LINE: The wet thud of a thick fruit smashed against a sidewalk.

Decent description of the maniac’s head splitting against a gravestone. It’s rare to get a description this specific in Road Weenies, so I’ll take it.

Copies

SUMMARY: The narrator and his little brother Nicky get dragged to Dad’s office for Take Your Kid To Work Day, and it’s about as exciting as it sounds. The only option the boys have to pass the time is by abusing the new copy machines. The narrator has Nicky stick his head in one and make a thousand copies (!) of his face, while the narrator pulls down his pants and xeroxes a thousand copies (!!) of his butt. He is disappointed to see that each copy is more and more faded, then horrified when he discovers that Nicky’s face has literally faded away. So has the narrator’s butt. And he has to go to the bathroom.

MY THOUGHTS: I could see a five year old maybe finding this funny. There is an element of “bad kids getting their just desserts” but it’s mired by uninspired writing.

BEST LINE: Might as well make a thousand copies of my butt to go along with the thousand of Nicky’s face.

Wasting that much paper should get a person deported.

Shaping the Fog

SUMMARY: Ken, Serra, and Rowen sneak outside late at night when the fog is thick. It’s “good fog” that night, which means they can sculpt cool shapes out of it, like birds and bats and such. Ken reminds them to be quiet and not wake the “old man” while they make things in the fog. When Ken spots Rowen trying to make a small boy like himself out of the fog, he blows it away and scolds him, reminding him that the old man said never to make forms like themselves. By now the old man has heard them and come outside, explaining that when the kids make their own fog-kids, the new kids tend to be troublesome. Then he reveals the three kids are fog-sculpts themselves by blowing on and dissipating them, sending them back to their foggy origins as he begins to sculpt something new.

MY THOUGHTS: This one should be really cool, but all the story elements are stripped down to such a bare-bones level that everything isn’t clear on the first reading. I get the impression that the old man is lonely, and he’s good enough at fog-sculpting that he’s made himself children, but the children want to fog-sculpt too, and if they sculpt other fog-children, the new children are problematic. Apparently the old man is sick of telling them not to do this, so he just kills the three of them and starts making replacements. He doesn’t want to kill them, but he can’t afford them making new kids that will be out of control.

This paragraph makes the essence of the story more obvious than the story itself. I think the fog animals made by the kids are animated and not just shapes drifting along, but I’m never entirely sure: Lubar describes a fog-bat “fluttering,” but he also describes the breaking of a branch as a “scream” in another story. The most we get about the old man’s regret for what he’s about to do is that his voice is “soft and sad.” The best explanation he gives about why the kids shouldn’t make other kids is that, “they do not obey.” We get no background on the old man himself except that he sculpts fog real good: nothing about why he’s living here alone, or if he’s kind to the fog children outside of Good Fog Day. We don’t even know if he’s making new fog kids at the end of the story, or if he’s decided a fog-dog would be far less trouble. If this story was written for kids, it needs to make these things a lot clearer, especially if an adult has to pick it apart to make sure he’s understanding it himself.

Why kill all three for Rowen’s transgression anyway? Why not just kill Rowen and replace him while the two obedient kids look on sadly? That would have been way more effective.

BEST LINE: As his awareness bled into the waiting mist…

Cool description of Ken’s death. It’s about the only clear, vivid concept in this story.

Willard’s Oppositional Notebook

SUMMARY: Willard buys a notebook at a garage sale that turns out to have special properties: whatever he writes in the book, the opposite happens to him. He abuses the book and changes his life for the better, getting good grades, seeing movies at the theater free of charge, the school bully leaving town forever, etc. He gets the bright idea to write the word “die” in the book so he can be immortal, and catches his little sister Tammy messing with the book before he grabs it from her and buries it in a wet cement foundation to secure his immortality. He quickly begins to gain weight because his sister apparently started to write her name in his book, but only got as far as the T, which turned “die” into “diet.” So now he’s fat forever.

MY THOUGHTS: It’s an interesting enough “Death Note” scenario to keep me wondering how it’s all going to blow up in Willard’s face. Like many of these stories, it would be better if we got more details about the results of his use of this notebook, and/or if he would use the notebook for something more interesting than petty stuff. And the twist isn’t great, because the gimmick of the notebook is that whatever he writes in it, doesn’t happen, and I don’t think writing “diet” would be enough to make him spontaneously gain weight. It’d make more sense if he was driven to eat bad food all the time, like an addict.

BEST LINE: Willard’s first list, which consists of clean my room, finish my book report, watch Cartoon Cavalcade at six tonight. No kid in the history of forever wrote their daily itinerary like this. More than likely their parents would be managing their cartoon-to-homework life balance.

A Tiny Little Piece

SUMMARY: Julie’s class goes to the museum to see the mummy exhibit, where there are no less than two thousand mummies on display. Julie impulsively steals a piece of one mummy when no one is looking. At first she feels bad about it, but then she figures it’s just one little chunk o’ mummy, it didn’t do any harm. Later that night, the mummy she took the piece from breaks into her house, shambles into her bedroom, and steals a single hair from her head before shuffling back into the night. Julie figures it’s a fair trade, until the next mummy comes in and does the same…then the next…then the next…

MY THOUGHTS: It’s cute, I have to admit. Most of the stories in Road Weenies make me angry just to read them, from both a reader’s and writer’s standpoint, but I give this one a pass. I don’t even mind the lesson aspect of the story about “what if EVERYONE did the bad thing you did, huh?” This might be my favorite, because the more I think about it, the more it makes me grin.

BEST LINE: The mummy came in the night.

The mummy’s visit comes so abruptly it’s kind of funny.

The La Brea Toy Pits

SUMMARY: Lyle doesn’t want to go to the tar pits, but his parents make him. He wanders off and finds a tar pit filled with toys, and suddenly becomes braindead obsessed with said toys, to the point where he starts sinking and has to be rescued by his parents. His parents think nothing of it and proceed to the tar pits proper, which are filled with mom and dad things, which mom and dad obsessively lunge upon. Mom and dad begin to sink, and drag Lyle down with them.

MY THOUGHTS: David Lubar would have been more subtle if he’d written, “CONSUMERISM BAD” on a ballpeen hammer and bonked me in the skull with it a hundred times. It’s a nonsensical idea meant as a cringey metaphor, and it was all written because he made a pun about the Labrea Tar Pits.

Also the toys in this pit are super lame. Tricycles, Chutes & Ladders, a pogo stick…all the most generic traditional stuff you can think of that kids stopped playing with long before 2005. Lubar didn’t even try to come up with insane stuff that kids might actually like. If the story is just gonna amount to a boneheaded social commentary message, at least put something cool in that tar pit, something along the lines of Blurp Balls or Heroquest or Ninja Turtles or even an Xbox!

BEST LINE: “Wow,” Lyle whispered, forgetting about his yo-yo.

Yeah, that’s a pretty low bar. A dog farting would make me forget about a yo-yo.

Mr. Lambini’s Haunted House

SUMMARY: Cindy isn’t scared of anything, so she smugly enters Mr Lambini’s haunted house attraction with her friend Beth. It’s a typical hokey haunted house affair, and despite Beth fleeing in terror, Cindy doesn’t bat an eye. When she goes through the final door, she offhandedly mentions to Mr Lambini that the haunted house wasn’t that scary. Mr Lambini points out that what she’s seen so far was just the entrance, before locking her in the real haunted house with a bunch of ghoulish creatures.

MY THOUGHTS: Here we have an example of how a bad ending can derail an otherwise promising tale. The idea of a kid who isn’t scared of anything being disappointed by a haunted house attraction, only to learn that the whole attraction was just the appetizer for the real deal, isn’t a bad one. The real problem is that Lubar doesn’t know where to end it: either leave us hanging with her realization that something is lurking in the dark of the haunted house proper, and she has no way out; OR keep it going, and have the house get worse and worse with each section, until our “fearless” heroine is a hideous bundle of nerves and tears. The first way lets the horror linger after the story is over; the second allows for an insane journey with the chance for a great payoff at the end. Maybe the prize is a free pass for another visit, and with an unhinged snicker she gives it to another kid at school who thinks he’s fearless.

BEST LINE: Cindy wasn’t scared. Not now. This time, Cindy was terrified.

The final line of the story, which brings it all screeching to an eye-rolling halt.

Numbskull

SUMMARY: The narrator has a cavity, and the doctor offers to fix it with or without an anesthetic shot. He opts for the shot, and for as long as his mouth is numb, he impulsively says rude things to people everywhere he goes. This gets him in trouble with the neighborhood bully, who knocks his teeth out…which means another trip to the dentist, and another shot.

MY THOUGHTS: It’s dumb. I don’t understand the connection between a numb mouth and insulting people, and there’s none given in the story. This particular kid just randomly insults people whenever he gets a local anesthetic. Because it’s funny! I guess!

BEST LINE: The needle got bigger and bigger as he brought it near me.

Yes, Narrator, that’s how perspective works.

A Little Night Fishing

SUMMARY: Another nameless narrator goes night fishing with his fishing-nut pal Wally, who has found a new fishing hole out past the old abbey. When Wally catches something, he fights to reel it in for a long time, and it begins dragging him into the water. The narrator somehow gets the impression that the thing in the lake was fishing for Wally, and it drags him under by his fishing line before the narrator can cut it and save him. Years later he sees a ghostly image of Wally beneath the surface asking him to join him.

MY THOUGHTS: It’s…okay. The concept of something in the lake fishing for Wally is interesting, but it’s not that well realized. Wally’s obsession with fish and the underwater are well-established, but he’s inexplicably drawn to this particular lake and doesn’t really clarify what drew him specifically: nothing about recurring dreams, or repeated visits where he felt more and more at home. He seems to just randomly want to fish at this new spot. The story probably should’ve ended shortly after Wally’s disappearance, when the narrator is pondering what happened and settles for the idea that something took Wally because he belonged down there. It’s vague, but not as slipshod as the sequences that follow, with Wally’s spectre beckoning to the narrator from beneath the water; and the conclusion with the narrator as an older man, who now thinks of Wally whenever he fishes, and doesn’t event seem to know exactly why he keeps fishing. The spectre thing seems to be thrown in for a cheap scare.

BEST LINE: I thought about Wally, and fishing, and life. Then I left.

A noncommittal statement that sums up the story in general.

Precious Memories

SUMMARY: Ricky’s dad is obsessed with video taping everything, and has a broad collection of tapes chronicling the family’s adventures. Ricky accidentally tapes over Dad’s tape of their vacation at Yellowstone, but soon discovers that everyone’s memories of the event have been erased as well. Ricky begins weeding out tapes of all his most embarrassing memories and recording over them; each time he erases a tape, he tests the result by mentioning the subject of the tape to see if Dad still remembers it, and he never does. Ricky then tapes over the “School Play” tape, his worst memory of all time, but Dad comes searching for the tape and mentions offhandedly that he was using it to compile all the important moments in Ricky’s life, starting with his birth. Before Ricky can stop the tape before it records over his childbirth, he ceases to exist; his “dad” is left wondering who left the VCR on, and muses on the idea of getting a video camera, but since he has no kids, he’s got no need for one.

MY THOUGHTS: Not bad, actually. The premise is pretty solid, and I like that the kid accidentally seals his own fate while on his zealous quest to erase all the bad events of his childhood. The “School Play” tape reveal is weak though: I don’t know why the video-obsessed Dad wouldn’t change the label on the tape if it was part of such an important video project, except as a plot contrivance to get the kid to record over the wrong tape. Could’ve been an easy enough fix: the label on the tape could have simply been misleading.

Lubar actually fleshes something out here, too: the Dad’s obsession with recording everything. A big, fat paragraph is spent establishing what a VCR nut Dad is. Another is spent building up Ricky’s guilt and anxiety about erasing the Yellowstone tape in the beginning. Precious Memories might be a solid entry if it were fleshed out just a bit more and if the tape label contrivance was fixed.

BEST LINE: Nothing was real for him until he saw it on television.

Finally something poignant for a character. I think this one sentence makes Dad the most fleshed-out character in the book.

Baby Talk

SUMMARY: The narrator is a girl with an infant brother she’s always taking care of, and she won’t stop complaining about it. Then the baby starts to talk in a surprisingly sophisticated manner, and Big Sis makes a deal to spend more time with the baby if he promises to keep his mouth shut until he’s old enough to actually talk, because Big Sis doesn’t want to be the center of a media circus. After an undisclosed amount of time serving the baby’s every whim, the dog, cat, and goldfish start talking, and want to cut their own deals.

MY THOUGHTS: It’s so short and rushed it doesn’t have enough time to be any fun. Like too many of these stories it reads like a treatment for a longer story. We don’t get any antics with the talking baby being a pain, or trying to get Big Sis in trouble for the fun of it, or Big Sis narrowly stopping the outside world from learning that her infant brother can talk like a grownup. The idea is introduced, and then it’s pinched off as quickly as it begins.

BEST LINE: A bubble slipped from her mouth. It rose to the surface and popped, spilling out the word, “Yup.”

Lubar puts more work into a short paragraph describing how the goldfish talks than he does into the rest of the story.

Unseen

SUMMARY: The narrator learns he has the power to change his surroundings when he walks long distances with his eyes closed. The longer he walks without opening his eyes, the more the world changes: subtly at short distances, drastically at longer hikes. After taking a lengthy stroll he opens his eyes and finds his living arrangements have improved: he has a brother instead of a sister, and a bigger, nicer house. For no reason whatsoever, he decides he needs to take an even longer walk, all the way to the edge of town and back, and when he opens his eyes, everything is an apocalyptic wasteland, and he’s a mutant with several screaming mutant baby sisters, and also he has no eyelids so he can’t change anything anymore.

MY THOUGHTS: It’s pretty nonsensical from start to finish. I’ll grant you the premise that a kid learns he can change his surroundings by taking long walks with his eyes closed. There’s no explanation for it, but whatever. Sci-fi and fantasy can grant one weird thing per story as a general rule, as long as everything else is grounded.

What really kills it are the contrivances the size of Jupiter. First, things don’t get progressively better or worse: they just randomly change. Taking longer walks makes the changes more drastic and complete, but there’s no pattern to the changes. Second, our hero has no reason whatever to try the walk again after he’s drastically changed his life for the better. He just suddenly becomes braindead and wants to do it again, nevermind the obvious fact that the changes are random. Finally, when he ends up in the Borderlands setting, he’s randomly mutated so that he can’t close his eyes, whereas all the times before there was no mention of any changes to the narrator himself until now. He suddenly mutates purely as a plot convenience.

His final home is pretty horrifying, and the ending is suitably bleak. How we got there is the problem. I’ll give you the world-changing blind-hike power, but you gotta give me logic and consistency as a fair trade. You can’t make things happen “just because” unless you don’t respect your craft or your audience.

BEST LINE: I enjoyed my new life for a couple of days, but the urge to walk was too strong to resist.

A couple of days. That’s how long it took for him to decide, “Nah, being smothered in swank is boring, let’s potentially screw it all up.”

Flyers

SUMMARY: Callie finds fliers blowing through her neighborhood each day, and when she grabs a flier, the print on said flier affects the rest of her day. 10% Off Everything makes food taste a bit blander, lights a bit dimmer, everything just a bit off. Two-For-One Special makes everything twice as nice all day. She eventually finds the printing press that makes the fliers and spits them across town: it’s located in a random garage, of all places. She sees a button for a flyer labeled Satisfaction Guaranteed and presses it before realizing she’d pressed the wrong button, and accidentally prints off hundreds of Fire Sale – Everything Must Go fliers. The sun blazes and everything burns up.

MY THOUGHTS: Kind of a cute idea. Not much more to it than that. It’s the kind of thing you come up with during a brainstorming session and laugh about, or something you make a reference to in a larger story; can’t really hold its own as a standalone.

Maybe when Lubar pumps out these ideas one after the other, he should be handing them off to other writers to finish them for him.

BEST LINE: Litter, she thought. How disgusting.

Two paragraphs later she tosses the flier back into the wind, with the rationalization that it isn’t litter if someone else dropped the flier in the first place. Gen Alpha logic, ladies and gentlemen.

Every Autumn

SUMMARY: Ted’s neighborhood has kids go missing without a trace every autumn. Ted wonders why this is. While evading a station wagon that he thinks is trying to kidnap him, he is eaten by a sentient pile of leaves, which then blows away in the wind.

MY THOUGHTS: Just because you have an idea, doesn’t mean you should commit it to paper.

BEST LINE: “Let go,” Ted screamed, yanking his leg.

No, no, Ted, do it again with feeling!

Goose Eggs

SUMMARY: Charlie hates geese, so he’s not thrilled when an especially mean goose wanders into his family yard and refuses to leave. His baby brother Cliff names it Honker. Charlie and Honker don’t get along, but one day Charlie discovers Honker can lay golden eggs. For whatever reason he insists on keeping this a secret from his family, and hides each golden egg in his bottom drawer. Eventually, as Charlie begins to re-think his illogical decision to hide the eggs from his parents, one of them begins to hatch, and a hideous bird monster starts to emerge. Charlie says “NOPE” and dumps all the eggs down a sewer drain, but when he comes home he learns that his idiot brother Cliff hid some of the eggs under Charlie’s mattress. They hatch and rip their way out of the mattress.

MY THOUGHTS: I don’t understand the reason for Charlie hiding the eggs. “Golden goose” stories only work if the recipient of the eggs goes too far in capitalizing on them. Charlie’s fear of the eggs being discovered is just another weak plot contrivance so we can get the final payoff of the monster birds hatching from under Charlie’s mattress, which isn’t even a payoff since they don’t actually do anything once they emerge. We get no evidence that the hatchlings are actually dangerous, just creepy-looking.

BEST LINE: He’d read stories–true stories–about people who’d done bad stuff to get gold.

Don’t give us examples of these stories by any means. That might actually give Charlie a good motivation.

Fresh from the Garden

SUMMARY: Judy asks her mom if she can grow a garden in the back corner of their new house’s backyard. She happily clears all the little stones and other debris from the area, and quickly nurses a lovely vegetable garden of lettuce, beans, carrots, and the like. Judy desperately wants to be part of the in-crowd at school, and invites a couple of the girls to her house for lunch, to taste the proverbial fruit of her labors. She sets out a really nice spread, and the girls are impressed with how nice the house is, mentioning that it’s a lot nicer than when Toby Mudmintz’s creepy family lived there. Apparently the son of the previous tenants raised hamsters, fish, and all sorts of small animals, and when they died, he didn’t flush them like a normal kid: he buried them in the back corner of the yard…right where Judy’s new garden resides.

As they explain all this, they are relishing Judy’s vegetables, while Judy is the only who notices the lettuce squirming like fish, and the beans screaming as they’re pierced with a fork. The girls enjoy their lunch and eagerly look forward to the next one. The horrified Judy just smiles and nods with dread.

MY THOUGHTS: The first half is about as bland as anything else in the book, but when the big reveal comes halfway through, and Judy starts to see the vegetables as Toby’s reincarnated pets being devoured alive, it quickly turns into a delight. The idea is really twisted, and it’s even better that Judy got what she wanted, but can’t enjoy it now. To retain membership in the “in” crowd she has to watch her little veggies suffer every day. Lubar ends the story right where it needs to end: Judy reluctantly agreeing to another lunch tomorrow, holding back the urge to scream and/or vomit. She can’t back out now, she’s committed.

I do have to wonder why the veggies were fine when she cut them into a salad, but not when they were being eaten. The only thing that comes to mind is that it’s all in Judy’s head, and the idea that she’s made her garden in a pet graveyard has made her suddenly neurotic with misplaced guilt. Also, a veggie platter seems like an odd thing for young girls to go ga-ga over, unless the story emphasized that all the girls were strict vegetarians. That would’ve made it infinitely funnier and added a great ironic edge.

BEST LINE: Judy nodded, not trusting herself to open her mouth.

Last line of the story, and for once a good closer. I can picture the mortified look on Judy’s face.

The Covered Bridge

SUMMARY: Carol hates the creepy covered bridge that stretches across the river, and she hates that she has to cross that bridge in order to walk her friend Jackie home. Jackie says there are worse things than a creepy bridge, like marigots, flesh-eating worms that surface from the earth every fifty years. Jackie keeps spooking Carol during the whole walk, shouting, “THERE’S ONE!” and then laughing when Carol jumps. Carol finally decides to brave crossing the bridge, with Jackie in the lead. When Jackie reaches the other side first, she is set upon and devoured by swarms of marigots, who ignore Carol because apparently they don’t like the bridge either. Carol goes home no longer afraid of the bridge, and apparently none too fazed by the horrific death of her friend.

MY THOUGHTS: Carol is a sociopath, apparently. She cares more about her standing with a creepy old bridge than she does about having watched her friend get eaten alive right before her eyes. The two elements don’t really play off of each other at all: either there should have been something truly dangerous about the bridge that kills Jackie when she doesn’t take it seriously; or the story should have revolved around the worms. Lubar could’ve gotten two half-baked stories out of these concepts instead of just one!

It might have almost worked if it had ended with Carol watching in horror as her friend was being devoured, and for once being thankful for the bridge that kept her alive. But it doesn’t: Carol actually celebrates her survival and doesn’t give her dead friend another thought, which seems unrealistic and quite frankly irreverent. I don’t say, “Good on you, Carol, for overcoming your fear,” so much as I say, “Put this little brat in a straitjacket.”

BEST LINE: Even made-up stuff could be spooky after the sun went down.

This insipid observation is another exhibit in my case against an author who thinks he’s meeting his young audience on their level, when in fact he’s just talking down to them.

Buzz Off

SUMMARY: A bee lands on Adam’s hand one day in class, and everyone is amazed that Adam isn’t swatting at it or freaking out. As Adam and the kids discuss the odds of Adam getting stung if they try to swat it, more and more bees are drawn to him and land on him. They lose interest in the bees when the narrator starts getting covered in bats, and now they go on a bat tangent for the last few paragraphs.

MY THOUGHTS: While not scary or creepy, the discourse among the boys and Adam’s resignation to his situation are a pretty amusing read. It’s obvious Lubar had no idea where to go from there, so he brings in the bats out of nowhere. Until the bats showed up, it was getting interesting, and I wondered if the bees were going to carry Adam off, or literally turn him into a hive, or if he would simply be known as the kid who’s always covered in bees. Any of those options are better than the left-field bat ending we get. More proof that this collection wasn’t sullied by proofreading or second edits.

It’s extra aggravating when the story is actually good at first, then tanks partway through. I really don’t know what Lubar was thinking when he wrote these things.

BEST LINE: Michael shrugged. “Just stuff.”

Michael’s brilliant reply when asked what kind of bug spray his dad has. It makes me wonder if the extent of Lubar’s experience with ten year olds is limited to stupid ten year olds.

Just Desserts

SUMMARY: Dylan gets dragged out to a deep sea fishing trip with family by his Uncle Harold. He gets bored waiting for the boat to arrive at the fishing spot, and then bored again when the fishing is uneventful, so he goes into the cabin to eat his lunch and obsess over his fruit pie dessert. He saves it for later and takes a nap. When he wakes up, he’s the last one on the boat: everyone else has disappeared. While searching the boat for survivors, he keeps getting distracted by his fruit pie. Then the octopus who ate everyone gets him and eats him last. As he’s dragged overboard, Dylan wishes he’d eaten the fruit pie first.

MY THOUGHTS: Dylan is a moron. He’s alone at sea with no adults, and all he can think about is his stupid fruit pie. Even when he’s being eaten, he’s thinking about his fruit pie. His interest in actual survival is casual at best. Stupid story with an even stupider protagonist.

BEST LINE: He dreamed that he’d caught a shark. It fought for hours, but he brought it in. When he pulled it out of the water, it had Uncle Harold’s face.

This one line is more interesting than the entire story.

The Whole Nine Yards

SUMMARY: The narrator walks around the neighborhood with his friend Scott. They find freshly cured concrete with two perfect footprints in it, and Scott becomes determined to find a spot with wet concrete where he can write his initials. Every time they find a newly laid slab of sidewalk, it’s already cured, and has the same footprints in it. Scott is baffled as to how the kid who left the prints had made them so perfect. Finally they come to a slab of concrete that’s still wet, but when Scott kneels and writes his initials in it, something drags him headfirst into the wet concrete, leaving behind only a pair of shoe-shaped marks where the concrete filled in behind him.

MY THOUGHTS: At least this story has some kind of buildup to the payoff, with the mystery of the strangely perfect shoeprints in the concrete. Wish there was a better reason for why the concrete is randomly eating kids, and wish it didn’t end with a dumb one-liner. The premise is whimsical enough without ending it on a whimsical note as well.

BEST LINE: So that’s how it happened. And I thought I knew everything about concrete.

Last line of the story, a dumb comment that the story would be better without. I wouldn’t have as much beef with this story if it had just ended with the reveal of how the footprints were made. The one-liner not only lets the steam out of the reveal, it feels condescending, too, like it was added just in case the reader couldn’t connect the dots on his own.

The Green Man

SUMMARY: The narrator’s town has all kinds of stories circulating about the Green Man, and nobody can agree on any of them. Is he not of this earth? Is he human? Does he fly? Was he a cop at one point, or in the army? Does he have a killer collie? Nobody knows. The narrator becomes obsessed with finding evidence of the Green Man’s existence, and triangulates the supposed sightings to the shed behind the town pool, where he meets a man covered in green tattoos with a collie. When confronted about whether he’s the Green Man, the Green Man replies that it doesn’t matter who he is, the kids makes his own fears. Then he departs, leaving the narrator wondering what kind of scary thing will replace the Green Man now that he’s no longer afraid of him.

MY THOUGHTS: A narrative mess with a pretentious theme. It’s impossible to find the Green Man scary, or even interesting, because there are literally no corroborated accounts of who he is, what he is, or what he does: all the accounts of the Green Man conflict with one-another, which means he’s literally nothing. So the pretentious theme of people inventing fearful stories around something that probably isn’t all that scary falls flat on its face when we finally meet him.

BEST LINE: I really didn’t understand what had happened.

I’m glad the narrator is just as lost as I am.

Dizzy Spells

SUMMARY: Monty discovers that his wishes come true when he makes himself dizzy, but each time he has to make himself dizzier than the last time or it doesn’t work. Somehow the dizzier he gets, the more clouded his brain gets, and the stupider his wishes get. He blows one wish on a horse because for some reason he couldn’t think of anything else. When he boards the Spinulator ride at the theme park, he gets so dizzy he impulsively wishes the world would stop spinning. The earth stops spinning and everything goes flying.

MY THOUGHTS: Random dizzy-wish magic notwithstanding, I have a hard time buying that the kid would get so dizzy that he wouldn’t remember what he wanted to wish for. I’ll grant you the horse wish, since he made the mistake of not thinking of a wish before making himself dizzy, but the last wish is just an excuse for a crazy twist ending. On the plus side, there’s some logical progression to this one, unlike stories like Unseen: each time he makes a wish, he has to be even dizzier than the last time before it will come true, so he can only do it so many times. The premise is still kind of weak, though, compared to some of the other ideas in the anthology.

I come up with a lot of ideas that I don’t commit to paper because they don’t work, or there’s not enough substance to commit to a full story. If I came up with an idea about a kid who can make his wishes come true when he makes himself dizzy, I probably would’ve dismissed it as soon as it came to mind. Unseen had a cooler premise, even if it lacked the logical progression of this story’s magical gimmick. Lubar could’ve dumped this story and transplanted the “limited uses” idea to Unseen, and made Unseen all the stronger as a result.

The sequence where they spin their heads on the baseball bat and then try to hit a home run while dizzy was pretty fun, though. I think I did that as a kid, too.

BEST LINE: That’s when he knew. All he had to do was get dizzy, and his wishes would come true.

What exactly made him so sure of this revelation so suddenly? Even a ten year old wouldn’t be this quick to come to such a far-fetched conclusion. Maybe I was right a few entries ago: Lubar only has experience with dumb kids.

The Tank

SUMMARY: Jeremy keeps hearing thumping from inside the house’s septic tank. He learns from his parents that the sewage in the tank grows bacteria that seep into the lawn, and they can’t use drain cleaner or it’ll kill the bacteria. The thumping leads Jeremy to the conclusion that a monster is growing inside the septic tank, and after a moment’s guilty hesitation, he dumps drain cleaner down the sink to kill it. Later when the sewer guy comes to pump the tank, Jeremy falls in and gets eaten by the monster inside, which briefly hesitates and considers showing mercy, before killing him anyway.

MY THOUGHTS: Another brilliant protagonist. Thumping + bacteria = THERE’S A MONSTER UNDER THE HOUSE AND I’VE GOT TO KILL IT NOW. A smart, logical protagonist would require a series of strange events before drawing this conclusion, but this is a Lubar protagonist. Lubar protagonists draw whatever idiotic conclusions are necessary to railroad the narrative.

BEST LINE: Jeremy didn’t make it a habit to stare into toilets.

At least the opening line is hilarious and grabs you right away. I love this line.

Anything You Want

SUMMARY: Sissie is babysitting her toddler brother Stevie at the park when a genie bottle is unearthed from beneath an old tree. Unfortunately Stevie gets to the bottle first, and the genie must grant his three wishes. Sissie is forbidden by the genie to influence Stevie’s decisions, despite the fact that he’s three years old. He wishes for peas, his favorite food, and the genie mistakes his wish for “peace,” so he grants a hundred years of world peace to a disappointed Stevie. Next the toddler wants “liver never,” because he hates when Mom makes liver for dinner. The genie mistakes this for “live forever” and makes Stevie immortal. Finally Stevie sees Sissie signaling him to let her make the third wish, and Stevie says “Sissie wish.” The genie disastrously mishears this as “turn my sister into a fish.”

MY THOUGHTS: The idea is cute: a teenage girl discovers a genie in a bottle, but her toddler sibling gets to it first and blows all his wishes. The problem is, while I can believe how the first wish is misunderstood, the second and third are a real stretch. “Liver never” is an odd way for even a toddler to say he doesn’t want to eat liver anymore, and without the emphasis on the boy’s inability to enunciate his words, or at least showing the genie struggling to interpret what the kid said, I don’t see how it could be misheard as “Live forever.” Again we’re told Sissie’s observation that she can apparently understand Stevie better than anyone else, including genies, but we aren’t shown how this occurs in any clever or funny sort of way. All we get about Stevies’ speech patterns is that he speaks in one to three words, not that he butchers them like the grandma of Bed Tings. The misinterpretation of the last wish is really hard to swallow: even when butchered by a toddler’s rubbery tongue, I don’t believe “Sissie wish” could be mistaken for “Sissie fish,” nor how those two words could be twisted into “turn sister into a fish” instead of “give sister a fish.”

So the idea isn’t bad at all, it’s the sloppy execution that’s the problem. This could have been really funny with more effort put into how and why the wishes were misunderstood.

BEST LINE: I wasn’t going to argue. His eyes had that same look Mom and Dad get before they stop trying to reason with me and send me to my room.

Unlike the extent of the baby/genie language barrier, this paints a vivid picture.

Lines

SUMMARY: Andrea is tired of walking in line with her class from place to place each day, so she breaks the line and walks beside her friend Nicole for a change. Everyone seems to forget she exists, and she indeed appears to be fading out of existence. She figures it’s because she stepped out of the line, so when her class walks back to the classroom, she rejoins the line, and regains her solid form again…but now nobody knows who she is.

MY THOUGHTS: Lubar has a habit of grasping at straws for weird story ideas. Here he tries to make the concept of lining up for class into some kind of weird morality play, but it’s impossible for a kid to relate to this. They can relate to going everywhere in a line, and getting in trouble for stepping out of the line, but we’ve all stepped out of line before, or known kids who did it, and the worst that happens is the teacher yells at somebody. Any misbehavior at school just gets you in trouble with the teachers. There’s no mystery about what would happen if you stepped out of line, or even if you disobeyed the system in general: you’d eventually get suspended. It’s like if he wrote a story about a girl fading from existence because she decided to run a red light on her way to work. There’s no mystery there, either: you either get a ticket, or an auto accident.

There are other school-related mysteries that would make for better supernatural stories, like what the school is like when the kids aren’t there, or what all the teachers do when school is out, or what really happens to a classmate who gets expelled. Stepping out of the line isn’t among those mysteries.

BEST LINE: “It’s just a line,” Andrea said weakly.

Sums up everything that’s wrong with the premise. My sentiments exactly, kid.

Wandering Stu

SUMMARY: Stuart is a selfish brat who acts like he’s the only person on earth, so a weird stranger comes along and makes everyone else in the world vanish, leaving Stuart stranded on a deserted planet. Stuart calls the stranger back and says he gets his point, he learned his lesson, and asks how to make amends. The stranger says all he has to do is do something nice for someone else…then realizes he didn’t think his punishment through, since there is no one else on earth now. With a hasty apology, the incompetent being abandons Stuart to his fate.

MY THOUGHTS: The whole planet gets wrecked in order to punish one stupid kid, who isn’t even repentant, just bored. It’s meant to be a funny take on the It’s a Wonderful Life sort of story where divine intervention alters a person’s life to teach them a lesson, except the divine power behind the lesson is an idiot. Could be done in a clever way by an author who bothers to put time and effort into their work, but not one with a “quantity over quality” agenda.

BEST LINE: “Once the conditions are set, they have to be met. Hey–that rhymed.”

Ugh.

Tarnation

SUMMARY: The narrator and his brother Alexander argue over the existence of monsters. Alex insists they’re real and you can summon them to your house by saying the magic words a hundred times, and if they like you, they’ll give you a present, but they’ll do you harm if they don’t like you. They try it one night after Dad has tarred up the cracks in the driveway. It’s a grueling exercise, but they manage to get through the ritual, and then from outside they hear a hideous shriek. They look out front and see a monster trapped in Dad’s tar spread, spitting and yowling like a cat. They hide and hope it didn’t see them. The next morning Dad finds evidence that someone stepped in his tar and blames it on his boys. The boys dread the monster’s return, since it’s obvious it doesn’t like them at all.

MY THOUGHTS: It mostly consists of the boys getting bored and tired as they say the same phrase over and over. The ritual to summon monsters could have been anything. They could’ve been required to do a series of bad deeds that would get them in trouble, but they do it anyway because the monster’s gift would be worth it. The story could’ve played up what kind of awesome blessing the monster brings if he likes the summoner, or the terrible fate it brings for those it dislikes. We don’t get any of this, of course. We get vague notions that something good or bad will happen, and all the kids have to do is repeat a phrase a hundred times. The story is completely creatively bankrupt besides the setup of the tarred driveway causing the monster to turn on the thoughtless boys.

BEST LINE: I have to admit, there was a part of me that wondered how long it would take to say something one hundred times. It was a bit cool to think about that.

Said no kid ever.

Ten Pounds of Chocolate

SUMMARY: Amy and Wendy are trick-or-treating, and take a detour down a steep San Francisco-style road to a house where a weird old woman supposedly hands out ten pound bars of chocolate to kids. The woman is eerie, but friendly, and has a pretty black cat as a pet. Sure enough, she has two big bars of chocolate on her coffee table, which she deposits into the girls’ arms. But as the girls lug their booty back uphill, they are chased by a panther that leaps out of the bushes, and are forced to drop their chocolate bars in order to outpace it. The panther, which turns out to be the old woman’s cat, collects the bars and returns to its master so they can try again with the next trick-or-treaters.

MY THOUGHTS: It’s almost a cool concept, but it makes zero sense. I don’t understand why the witch gives out big bars of chocolate to slow down the kids as they run from her panther. She’s not killing the kids and collecting their bones, yet she seems to treat it as a victory even when the kids escape. She tells the girls that she tries to leave a good impression so that nobody spreads rumors about her, yet it seems everyone who comes to her house for candy gets nearly eaten by a jungle cat! What’s her motivation? What is she accomplishing exactly? Is she just using the panther to retrieve and reuse the same two chocolate bars to leave a falsely positive impression on all the kids? Wouldn’t everyone figure out her pattern eventually and start speaking ill of her anyway? Why not just be genuinely nice to the kids? Why can’t David Lubar proofread a single, solitary story for his collections? Does he have the attention span of a goldfish?

BEST LINE: “No way,” Amy said. “That can’t be true.”

If nothing else, Lubar usually knows how to open a story. The first sentence already has me wondering what’s going on in a good way.

The Boy Who Wouldn’t Talk

SUMMARY: Nobody knows why Tommy Griffin never speaks in class. When anyone asks him, he either gives them a wry shrug, or somehow makes them forget the question. The narrator is so determined to find out why that he stalks Tommy after school and follows him home, to a dilapidated neighborhood full of condemned houses. He spies through Tommy’s window and watches him distort into a plant creature and bury himself in a sandbox-like bed. Then the narrator is grabbed by roots reaching up from under his feet. A page break leads us to the final paragraph from the plant-monster’s perspective: he’s eaten and imitated Tommy and plans to eat and imitate more of the kids later, starting with the narrator.

MY THOUGHTS: “Tree monster” isn’t the first answer my mind would have gone to. Maybe not even the sixth or seventh. I guess it at least makes the ending unpredictable, it just leaves too many unanswered questions, as usual. If he can imitate a human kid well enough to pass his classes for him, he should be able to simply write a note saying he lost his voice in an accident. And if he can bend humans to his will like the final paragraph states, any explanation he gives should be enough. He could give other signs to the narrator that something isn’t right, and that inspires him to follow him home. Filling in the unanswered questions would make the epilogue unnecessary, and leave room for a stronger ending.

BEST LINE: I realized there was at least one big advantage to not talking–you didn’t get stuck having to do what you said you’d do.

A surprisingly funny observation that fits the theme.

Invasion of the Road Weenies

SUMMARY: Marlon sees joggers around town all the time, and he wonders why they never smile. He decides to get to the bottom of it, and maps out the routes of every jogger in town, until he determines that they are all coming from this one barn: they jog into the barn and form a line, then when they reach the front of the line, they take off jogging again. By nightfall they close themselves up in the barn and start it all over again the next morning. Marlon decides to see what would happen if he bars them inside the barn. Each day that goes by without the joggers covering their routes, the world gets blurrier and “forgotten.” Realizing the world needs the joggers to see all of the things to keep them from fading away, Marlon releases the joggers again, who randomly draft him to join them. They force him to start jogging to help keep the world from fading away.

MY THOUGHTS: From the appendix entry for this story: “Like the character in the story, I noticed that adult joggers never smile. As I started wondering about this, I realized that something must be making them jog. This was the best explanation I could come up with.“

So this was David Lubar’s best explanation.

Let me take a stab at it:

The joggers are members of a devilish gym program that promises them an ideal body in exchange for their souls. Marlon finds out the hard way that it’s all a sham as he runs himself to death.

The joggers are meat golems produced and animated by a local meat plant, and they jog around town to make their meat leaner before returning to the plant to be processed. Marlon gets mistaken for one and ground into sausage.

The joggers are robots stealthily scouting invasion territory for an alien invasion force or a foreign terrorist cell.

The joggers are exercising and they’re tired from the exercise.

The titular story of the collection is by far its most nonsensical. No attempt at a logical connection between the joggers and the fading of the planet is given. Somehow just by jogging their routes, these idiots keep the world from fading into oblivion. It’s so unfitting and ridiculous I have to wonder if the author wrote it while suffering a state of delirium from sleep deprivation. Marlon’s question about why joggers never smile is insipid from the very start. Nobody smiles when they’re working out. Exercise is hard work and you have to focus on what you’re doing.

BEST LINE: Maybe seeing was more than believing. Maybe seeing was all that kept things real.

How many of these joggers make regular trips to the rain forest, I wonder?

We Interrupt This Program

SUMMARY: The narrator is a kid sitting on the couch, messing with the TV remote that he doesn’t usually get to use: usually his dad has the remote when he’s home at work. The parents are away and it’s just the narrator and his bully of a brother, so he’s experimenting with the remote’s countless buttons. He wonders what the “insert” button does, and finds that it inserts him into whatever program he’s watching. He has a few harrowing experiences while playing with this feature, until his bully brother extorts the remote from him so he can try to insert himself into an episode of Star Trek. Unfortunately he presses it during an establishing shot of space, and dies messily to explosive decompression. The narrator changes the channel quickly and hopes they can get a replacement remote soon.

MY THOUGHTS: If only this story were longer and more fleshed out, it would be a lot of fun. I want more details of the shows and movies he inserts himself into before the payoff at the end with the brother’s demise. It’s too fun a concept to waste on a two-and-a-half page fart of flash fiction. The narrator’s entire experience going in and out of hundreds of TV programs is rushed through in a single paragraph.

I also find it easier to believe a magic TV remote than a lunch-money extorting bully being a Trek fan. Not that Trek fans aren’t bullies, they just tend to be Sheldon Cooper rather than Nelson Muntz.

BEST LINE: In a flash, there were cowboys all around me. They were trying to control a stampede. There were also cows all around. I’d inserted myself into the program.

The most interesting parts of the story get the most uninspired and lazy writing, and this passage is a perfect example.

The Smell of Death

SUMMARY: Dad sprayed the lawn for bugs again, and explains that the spray never kills 100% of them, leaving the survivors to breed a new generation that’s immune. That’s why Dad rotates the sprays he uses every time. This time the bugs swarm together and emit their own toxic spray on the humans. The narrator prepares for a back-and-forth spray war between humans and bugs.

MY THOUGHTS: Another potentially interesting idea goes to waste for the sake of quantity over quality. The idea of the bugs spraying back, and the humans and bugs going back and forth using more potent forms of pest killer isn’t a bad one. But again, it comes and goes like a fart in a jacuzzi, without any time for development or escalation.

BEST LINE: They didn’t look very flowery. Something had been munching down on them like they were a bag of chips.

We have quite a few varieties of flowers in our garden, and I wouldn’t describe any of them as growing in bags. The point of a metaphor or simile is to make a comparison between two things which are similar.

The Shortcut

SUMMARY: Lucas and Chuck get caught in the rain, and Chuck gets the bright idea to take a shortcut through the new section of the hospital. Fearing that they’ve angered the security guard, they run downstairs and hide in what turns out to be the morgue, with the back wall lined with cadaver lockers. They get locked in for the night, and the janitor turns out all the lights, leaving the boys in pitch blackness with a wall of cadavers. Lucas loses track of where Chuck is, and Chuck doesn’t respond when Lucas calls him. He starts to get mad when he hears lockers sliding open one after the other, and thinks Chuck is playing a trick on him. He learns how wrong he is when he bumps into the shambling, hungry cadavers that his shouting awoke.

MY THOUGHTS: This was the straw that broke my camel’s back. It’s got a strong opening with the boys stuck in the rain, and taking shelter in the hospital, only to find themselves cornered in the cadaver room. When the lights go out, and Lucas is bumbling around the room with the lockers opening one by one, you can cut the tension with a knife. When he bumps into a living cadaver instead of his undoubtedly dead friend, it’s the payoff we’ve been waiting for.

Then the cadavers speak, the tension is flushed down the toilet in an instant, and I vow never to touch another insipid book by David Lubar for as long as I live.

BEST LINE: “You weren’t supposed to arrive for many years.”

“You’re ahead of schedule.”

“Looks like you took a shortcut.”

These closing lines made me pace in anger around the house for a good ten minutes, and I nearly yeeted the book across the room. It was all so good until those last clumsy, stupid lines killed it.