SHOCKTOBER You Know What You Have to Do by Bonnie Shimko YP FIC SHIMKO

Mary-Magdalene (Maggie to her friends) Feigenbaum seems like your average 15 year old.  Sure she has a weird name and her step-dad is the local mortician. Sure her mom dresses like a trashy teenager from the 80s (coincidentally when she had Maggie) and acts more like her sister, but relatively normal. Except for the voice.  The one that tells her she has to kill and how to get away with it.  The one that's already had her kill once and wants her to kill again. 

This is an engrossing thriller that will garb ahold of you and keep you reading as fast as you can to the very end.  It's a sick sort of thrill to be in the mind of a teenage serial killer.    Since we get the entire story from her perspective, we share in her fear of getting caught instead of rooting for it.  It's also really creepy that she spends so much time worrying about her relatively mundane boy problems and issues with her once-dorky friend joining the Cool Kids Table. The focus of this, distracts from the fact that we're being told the story from a cold blooded killer until the voice comes back and brings us back to sobering reality. Maggie's drive for murder is just one aspect of her life.  It's normality to her is genuinely unnerving and way more unsettling then if she was more conflicted outwardly. Maggie is also genuinely funny, with a dry sense of humor she shares with the reader and hides form the rest of the world.  This makes her both weirdly likable and made me feel complicit, like I was keeping her secrets. 

Unfortunately, the book has some notable flaws that keep it from being as good as it could have been.  Most the characters seem sort of thinly fleshed out, without much deep personality.  However, we are getting the viewpoint of a cold blooded murderer, so that could be partially why we don't get to know them very well.  Also, there's some occasional clunky dialogue and the book sometimes feels sanitized for your protection.  This is clearly a deliberate choice to make the book less graphic and bleak, but it will seem unrealistic to some readers.  however, it really worked for me.  Maggie is a bit shy and her best friend is woefully naive, so that fit their characters relatively well.  Also, keeping a lot of cursing and gory details made the book more medium dark than out and out bleak.  It reminded em of Lois Duncan, R L Stine, and Christopher Pike.  Always creepy and dark but usually not very explicit, but I think Shimko has the potential to out-write them all.  However, I think many readers will dislike the ending.  Without spoiling anything the book ends pretty abruptly and some people you expect to get the bloody justice they deserve don't.  Personally, I found the ending sort of ambiguous.  It definitely did end a bit too quickly and neatly for my tastes, but Maggie isn't the most reliable of narrators, so I'm not convinced as she is that her troubles are really over. Instead of feeling cheated by an anticlimax, I found it clever.  It made me realize that I was looking for more violence!  I was getting as bad as Maggie! I will admit that not getting more real answers about Maggie's condition was galling, but the faults are never enough to keep the book from being seriously gripping.  I highly recommend it to thriller fans. 

You can find You Know What You Have to Do in our catalog here.

Severed by Scott Snyder and Scott Tuft Illustrated by Attila Futaki YP FIC SNYDER

When twelve year old Jack Garron ran away to meet the father he never knew he didn’t just hit the road, he entered the food chain.  The year is 1916 and it is a hard time for the country and a dangerous time to be a boy on his own.  More dangerous than Jack could ever imagine. An old man with razor sharp teeth and a hunger for the flesh of children is hunting Jack and Jack has no idea he’s fallen into his clutches.  Jack will learn that evil walks the roads, all dreams have a cost, and nightmares are real.  

This is a truly chilling and twisted comic.  Snyder has been writing some of the darkest and grittiest Batman stories ever of late (see my review of The Black Mirror here) and he clearly knows how to look into the dark spots of the human psyche, but gee willikers! He’s really outdone himself with this look at the death of the American Dream.  His central villain is cunning, soulless, and seemingly unstoppable.  Seeing him slowly close in and circle Jack provides tension like a tightly wound string. 

 

Snyder and Tuft recreate the early 20^th century America and all its dangers very well.  The realistic setting helps ground the elements of the fantastic and make them feel all too real.  The use of string supporting characters that you grow to like is only a way to make it all the more terrifying when they are in mortal danger.  The art has a realistic quality that separates it from super hero fare and Futaki’s skill at expressing emotion on faces makes all the characters come to life quite vividly.  It makes all the difference, because a razor toothed old man could have ended up being a very silly image.  Instead he is a malevolent force of violence and death personified and a great addition to the annals of villainy.  This is an excellent comic book and a great bloody piece of intelligent horror fiction.  A great read for fans of either and so good that it could make converts of readers that think that horror or comics are beneath them. Just read it with the lights on…during the day…with someone else at home.

You can check our catalog for Severed here.

The Diviners by Libba Bray YP FIC BRAY

Evie O’Neill has managed to get herself kicked out of town for her latest in a series of drunken shenanigans (and during Prohibition no less!), but fortunately for her she’s been exiled to live with her uncle in New York City!  There she tries to hide a secret from her occult obsessed uncle, she has a mysterious power to read memories from objects, but she’ll need her power because a diabolical serial killer is stalking the streets and she may be the only one who can stop him.  

So the summary above doesn’t mention that Evie also makes many very odd friends that have their own troubles and even tell the story from their perspective.  This can get a bit unwieldy at parts because the book will eb going multiple directions at one, however it is all for the good as Bray’s excellent writing make all the supporting characters an integral part of the story.  Evie herself is wonderfully brash and at times downright unlikeable, which I like in a heroine!  I mean, who says and does the right thing all the time?  I like my protagonists to be occasionally annoying as well as witty, brave, and original.  Evie is all these and more!  The cast of supporting characters is really wonderful and the book feels like a true ensemble.  Best of all might be the wonderful amount of period detail that Bray brings out.  Loads of authors are trying to makes the 20s be the new hot spot for historical YA, but I think bray may be top of the heap for quite a while.  She makes New York come alive so that the setting is a hugely important part of the story.  She kills it with the murder mystery angle as well.  The murder chapters where the killer stalks are so wonderfully creepy! The book has enough mysteries, secrets, action, suspense, and o be read for the sparking plot alone, so it’s really wonderful that it also has top notch characters, prose, dialogue, and pacing!   

So with all this greatness, there simply must be SOMETHING for me to complain about!  Well, it is rather long (just under 500 pages!), but when a book is so good and so filled with so much character and so many ideas you don’t really want it to end.  Even better!  This is the first in a new series!  Even better than even better!  This story is self-contained and doesn’t make you wait months or years to find out how the first story ends!  The Diviners is definitely a must read for fans of historical fiction, mysteries, supernatural, and heck anybody that likes a good book.

You can check our catalog for The Diviners here.

Slice of Cherry by Dia Reeves YP FIC REEVES

Kit and Fancy Cordelle are best friends, sisters, and partners in crime. Their father was the infamous Bonesaw Killer, so it seems murder runs in their blood. They decide their bloodlust should only be satisfied with those who truly deserve it, but what to do with those pesky bodies? When Fancy discovers a doorway to a mysterious world the girls think they have the perfect spot to torture evildoers, but budding romances and emerging supernatural powers within the girls threaten to rip their happy family apart in this deliriously twisted companion novel to Bleeding Violet.

Brrrrrrr. This book gave me shivers of the creepiest kind. This si sort of a fantasy meets Dexter for teens. The girls are murderous sociopaths, but of bad guys…with magic! The kids are sick and twisted and delight in torture and blood, and they’re the heroes of the book! So clearly this violent and dark fantasy is not for everyone, but it has a weird appeal. Kit and Fancy’s madness and bloodlust is sort of fascinating in a bizarre way. You actually believe them as real (insane) people and their relationship is the core of the book. The two boys they fall in love with never seem as vibrant or original as the sisters, so their plotline kind of drags. The fantasy world is very well described and I wish there was more time put into the back story, like there was in Bleeding Violet, but the magical element does go very well with the sisters’ insanity. The main thing that will determine if you enjoy Slice of Cherry is if you like twisted, violent tales filled with bad people getting away with bad things.