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This post written by Clint The Invention of Hugo Cabret
by Brian Selznick
[cover name=theinventionofhugocabret]
Hugo’s father used to work in a museum. That’s where he found the automaton – a clockwork human sitting at a desk, ready to write a letter. Sadly, the automaton was broken, and Hugo’s father never figured out how to repair it. When he died, Hugo inherited the mechanical man and his father’s notebooks.
Hugo also inherited his uncle’s job, sort of. His uncle used to keep all the clocks in a Paris train station wound and running okay. In exchange, he and Hugo were allowed to live in a little apartment in the station. His uncle disappeared one day, so now Hugo secretly winds all the clocks on his own. As long as nobody notices that his uncle is gone, Hugo can keep living in the station and trying to fix the automaton.
Hugo needs parts to fix the automaton, so he steals toys from a toy store in the train station. He’s not that good of a thief, though, so the shopkeeper catches him, confiscates the notes his father gave him, and makes him work to pay for everything he stole. Then things get complicated.
The story is told through a mix of pictures and words. This isn’t quite the same as most graphic novels, where pictures contain words. Instead, some pages have words and others have pictures, but the two don’t really mix. You might find thirty or forty pictures in a row with no words, so you really have to pay attention to the art if you want to understand what is going on in the story.
You can watch a slide show of the opening pictures at the author’s website.
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This post written by Clint The Last Wish
by Andrzej Sapkowski
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Geralt de Rivia is a witcher, a monster hunter who uses magic, alchemy, his sword, and his brain to deal with dangerous creatures. He works as a mercenary, and he has a quirky sense of right and wrong. He has no problem killing three guys who attack him in a bar, for example, but he won’t immediately try to kill every supernatural menace he encounters. In this world, humans are often more evil than monsters, so maybe the person who hired Geralt is the villain and the creature Geralt has been hired to kill isn’t.
The Last Wish is a series of connected short stories. Geralt is recovering from his wounds in a temple, and the stories are flashbacks or stories he shares with people there.
This isn’t traditional heroic fantasy. As I said before, Geralt has a strange code of ethics, and sometimes he is tricked by a bad person into doing the wrong thing. The setting is kind of dark and gritty. The old, magical world is dying, and the new world is dominated by humans. People come to the wilderness, start new towns, and drive the monsters away. There is no one big bad out to conquer or destroy the world. Instead, we have evil humans and monsters facing extinction and trying to fight back.
There are some sexual situations in the story (including some in the first two pages), but most of it is only alluded to.
This is part of a larger series, which includes the TV series The Hexer (forget about the movie), several novels, some graphic novels, and a video game called The Witcher. The stories were all originally written in Polish; most, but not all, of the stories have been translated into English.
You can read some of the book online at the publisher’s website.
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This post written by Clint Skeleton Man
by Joseph Bruchac
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One day Molly’s parents vanish, but she has trouble accepting this. She lives alone for a while and tries to act like nothing has happened, but people from Social Services eventually catch on. They place her with her uncle, but Mollly has never heard of this uncle before. This uncle makes Molly very nervous, and sort of reminds her of a story her father told her.
Molly’s father grew up on a Mohawk reservation, and he made sure Molly was aware of her Mohawk heritage. One story he told her was the story of Skeleton Man, who was a lazy, greedy, and evil man who got hungry while he was waiting for his family to come home with food. First he ate his finger. Then he ate the rest of his flesh until he was just a skeleton. When his family came home, he went after them, too.
Molly is in trouble. Her creepy uncle locks her in her room every night, and she is terrified of him. Then she starts having disturbing dreams that seem to be warning her about him. Molly has to do something to save herself and find her parents.
You can read some of it online at the publisher’s website.
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This post written by Clint Wake
by Lisa McMann
[cover name=wake]
Janie Hannagan has a special power, or maybe a curse: whenever someone nearby falls asleep and starts to dream, Janie is sucked into the dream. She gets tag along while somebody flies around, shows up to work naked, or falls and falls and falls. Sounds fun, right? Janie is in high school, so she gets pulled in every time somebody falls asleep in class. She works at a nursing home, so she gets pulled in every time a resident dozes off.
She learns a lot about other people this way. She knows who who has a secret crush on her best friend, for example. She knows that somebody who lives on Waverly Road is really messed up. She knows that Cable, the class slacker, has dreams about her. Then she finds herself in one of Cable’s a really messed up nightmares, and she decides to stop watching and try to fix things.
You should know a few things about this novel before you start. First, a lot of it takes place in the dreams of teenagers. You know what that means. Second, there is a lot of swearing. Third, some people are put off by the writing style. You might want to preview it at Google Books.
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This post written by Clint Dead is the New Black
by Marlene Perez
[cover name=deadisthenewblack]
The women in Daisy Giordano’s family have special powers. Her mom can see bits of the future. One sister can read minds, and the other is telekinetic. Somehow, though, Daisy missed out. She’s normal, or as near as you can get when your family runs a psychic detective agency. A lot of strange things happen in her hometown of Nightshade, California, but Daisy’s life really gets interesting when the most popular girl in her high school comes back from vacation looking kind of dead. Undead, actually, and she’s popular enough to make pale skin and custom-made coffins stylish.
Then one of Daisy’s fellow high school students is murdered. Death doesn’t seem to stop this student, though, and she shows up to a pep rally. It’s up to Daisy and the police chief’s son Ryan (the guy she’s got a crush on) to figure out what’s going on.
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This post written by Clint Life Sucks
by Jessica Abel, Gabriel Soria, and Warren Pleece
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Dave has one of the worst jobs on earth. He’s the night manager at the Last Stop convenience store, but that’s not why his job is so awful. The real problem is his boss Radu, who happens to be a vampire. Radu is big into things like team spirit, so to make Dave a better employee, Radu made him a vampire, too.
Rosa, the woman Dave has a crush on, thinks that being a vampire must be wonderful – eternal life, vampiric sex appeal, the charming company of other vampires, money, power, and other fine things like that. Unfortunately, Dave gets nothing of this. He’s got no money. He rides a bicycle to and from his dead-end job, and he’ll probably work at the Last Stop for all eternity. Also, Dave has a thing about blood. Plus, even though he’s a real vampire, the goth women he interacts with seem more interested in goth guys with expensive capes and boots rather than real vampires with name tags that say “Shift Manager.”
Another thing that makes Dave’s life miserable is that he has to interact with Wes, a psychotic surfer vampire who is also a servant of Radu. When Wes finds out Dave is interested in Rosa, he decides to be interested in her, too. This is bad, since when I said Wes is psychotic, I mean he likes killing or enslaving people. Thus, Dave has to try to save Rosa, but keep in mind that Dave is a big old loser.
You can read the first eleven pages at MySpace or read a different thirteen pages at New York Magazine’s website.
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This post written by Clint Kaput & Zösky
by Lewis Trondheim
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Kaput and Zösky are two aliens who are out to conquer the universe. Zösky is the schemer, willing to try just about any crazy idea to take over a planet. Kaput is the psycho who would rather just charge in, guns blazing. Really, though, they both enjoy killing people.
Their problem is that they aren’t very good at being evil alien overlords. Usually, when they try to invade a planet, they lose. On the odd chance they win, the natives drive them out pretty quickly. Even when they find a planet that lets them take over, they find that they just don’t have what it takes to rule a world.
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This post written by Clint H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural: Classic Tales of the Macabre
edited by Stephen Jones
[cover name=hplovecraftsbookofthesupernatural]
H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of the Supernatural is a collection nineteenth-century horror stories. Even if you don’t like horror, keep reading. These stories are not the kind of things that Steven King or Clive Barker write. This book includes short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Washington Irving, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These stories are much more about developing an eerie atmosphere than they are about violence, blood, and terror.
H. P. Lovecraft was one of the most famous and influential horror writers in the United States. In addition to short stories and novellas, he wrote “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” an essay about the history of horror stories. For this book, Stephen Jones has collected nineteen of the stories from Lovecraft’s essay. These are some of the best short horror stories of the past 200 years: if you want to know who influenced your favorite horror authors, or if you dislike modern horror but enjoy weird stories, this might be a good book to read.
This is actually the second one of these collections that Stephen Jones has done. The first is called H. P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror.
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This post written by Clint Below the Root
by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
[cover name=belowtheroot]
The people of Green-sky, the Kindar, have a peaceful society that seems pretty much perfect. Even though they don’t have a lot of technology, the people there have everything they need. They live in the tops of giant trees and, because the gravity of Green-sky is weak, they can glide from tree to tree with the help of special clothing. Some of the people of Green-sky have psychic gifts – they can read other people’s emotions, teleport, move objects with their minds, or cause plants to grow.
There is only one problem in all of Green-sky: the Pash-shan are dangerous creatures that live underground. They are kept there, away from the rest of Green-sky, by a series of magical roots. As a precaution, though, none of the Kindar are allowed to go near the ground.
Raamo, a thirteen-year-old boy, is invited to join the Ol-zhaan, the priesthood that runs Green-sky and protects everyone from the Pash-shan. Raamo doesn’t understand why he has been chosen, but he eventually learns that he was picked because of his strong psychic powers. The root network that keeps the Pash-shan trapped underground has been weakening, and the priests hope Raamo will be able to fix it.
While he is training, Raamo meets two other new priest named Neric and Genaa. Neric suspects that the Ol-zhann are not entirely honest with the people of Green-sky. One day Raamo and Neric visit the surface, where they find a girl named Teera. Eventually, Raamo, Neric, and Genaa learn the Pash-shan are not what everyone believes, and their discovery changes the world of Green-sky forever.
Below the Root is the first book in a trilogy.There is also an old computer game that is a sequel to the trilogy. Zilpha Keatley Snyder actually helped write it, so if you are into vintage computer games, you might want to check out the Below the Root game from 1984.
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This post written by Clint Algernon Blackwood has been called the master of the English ghost story. He is often listed in the horror section, although he didn’t write what you probably consider horror. Blackwood’s stories are about the supernatural – ghosts, magic, and other strange creatures. Sometimes bad things happen, but some times they don’t. His stories aren’t terrifying in the blood and gore and monsters everywhere sense, but they are usually eerie or strange. He was a master of atmosphere and buildup,
Blackwood wrote a lot of short stories, and his themes ranged from reincarnation to romance to encounters with strange, unexplained creatures. However, almost every one of his stories has some weird element to it.
He also created John Silence, one of the earliest supernatural investigators.
Algernon Blackwood isn’t that famous among people who read modern horror, but he had a strong influence on H. P. Lovecraft and probably many modern horror writers, too.
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Where to Find His Books
You can read a lot of his books and stories online at the Penn State Online Books page.
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