Five go back to a nightmare ...
MEDDLING KIDS by Edgar Cantero (Titan £8.99)
BACK in 1977, the Blyton Summer Detective Club had their finest hour — four intrepid children and their faithful dog unmasked the villain masquerading as the local monster. Now, 13 years later, the ex-chums and a new dog have reunited.
Adulthood finds them in notgood shape. Kerri is drinking too much. Tomboy Andy has a penchant for violence and a prison record.
Nate is in an asylum. He has kept in touch with Peter, but he’s the only one who has — for the good reason that Peter died years ago.
They’re drawn back to the scene of their childhood triumph to face up to their personal demons and find out what really happened to them years before.
This second investigation isn’t like anything faced by the Famous Five — this time, they are up against necromancy and a threat to the entire world.
A clever and dark re-working of jolly Blytonian japes.
THE HOLLOW TREE by James Brogden (Titan £7.99)
RACHEL COOPER’S narrowboat holiday goes horribly wrong when she loses her left hand in an accident. While under anaesthetic, and then in her nightmares, Rachel has visions of a woman trapped inside a hollow tree, reaching out for her, whispering: ‘Not dead!’ as beetles tumble out of her mouth.
The dream becomes even scarier reality when the tree woman grabs hold of Rachel by her amputated hand and is pulled out into this world.
As a ghost, she is known locally as Oak Mary, but she explains that her real name is Annabel. She was killed by her husband and has now been brought back to life after deathly imprisonment in the tree.
She is one of several ghosts of murdered women held in its trunk, which is also home to Rachel’s own supernatural foe.
Inspired by a real corpse found in a tree, this is nicely done hokum featuring one of the great scary lines: ‘She was still screaming long after she died.’ Eek.
THE HUNGER by Alma Katsu (Bantam Press £14.99)
IT’S one of the most haunting tales of the American Wild West — the true story of the settlers’ trek led by George Donner, who came to a fork in the trail and took the path that led to certain doom.
Katsu offers her fictional re-creation of the expedition, showing the wagon trail succumbing to searing heat, freezing cold and starvation and then adding a few extrahorrific threats of her own.
These dangers are far worse than the usual wolves, bears and hostile landscape, as they seem to come from evil forces beyond our ken, involving human sacrifice, butchered children and cannibalism.
Gruesome, yes. Chilling, yes. But that expedition had enough to cope with in reality, so pitting them against supernatural forces, too, seems, well, unfair.
After the first slaughtered six- year- old, my queasy qualms grew and grew.