Words to live by: Never steal from a drunk in the woods.An epic and sudden blizzard is blanketing Mount Tom Regional High School . . . in October. A dangerous man is stalking the hallways, and three teens harbor a secret that may get everyone killed if they don’t figure out how to stop the snow and the rampage. Epic Award nominated author Howard Odentz is the author of the Dead (A Lot) Trilogy … (zombie apocalypse), the stand-alone horror novel Bloody Bloody Apple, and the short story collection Little Killers A to Z.
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This is a fun little romp that tells a simple tale: a group of kids wanting to have a fun time take someone’s bag. They quickly learn they shouldn’t.
This story isn’t breaking new ground or delving into a deep character study, so read this when you want a quick yarn. The ending is fantastic and I am still a bit startled I didn’t make the connection until the very end.
Definitely recommend checking this out!
I didn’t enjoy this, it was too juvenile and the MCs were too stupid for me. I know, they’re marijuana-smoking teenagers, but I still expected a bit more intelligence from them and much better dialogue from an author with six books to his name.
28% – ‘Jackie wasn’t deterred. She stepped up and over the felled tree. “Come on,” she said. “If someone’s dead I wanna see.”
Danny snorted. “This from the girl who got us all detention because she wouldn’t dissect a frog.”
“Yeah, so,” she shot back. “Frogs are all oogy and stuff.”
Danny and I looked at each other and shrugged because she had a point.’
So, dead and probably rotting and stinky bodies aren’t ‘oogy’?
41% – ‘He wasn’t a kid at all. He was a man, and he wasn’t even all that young. He had thick white hair and scraggly face scruff. How he ever managed to slip into Ms. Balsam’s detention unnoticed, wearing our clothes and acting like one of us, was totally insane. Suddenly my blood ran cold. Crap. Was he a narc? Was he here to bust the three of us for pot or to haul Lilly Scalia down to the police station for being so stupid?’
Is that meant to be funny!? What a stupid line!!
59% – ‘What did the guy mean when he said it wouldn’t stop until he had his bag back?’
Don’t the words kind of speak for themselves? What other meaning could be gleaned from what he said?
63% – ‘”There’s a door at the back of the library,” I blurted out. Both Danny and Jackie stared at me blankly. I shook my head. “It’s the big room with all the books in it.”‘
That’s just terrible dialogue!!! I don’t care how little these kids study (or how much weed is clouding their brains), there’s no way they wouldn’t know what a library is or even where on the campus it’s located.
71% – ‘Seeing outside made my head hurt. I didn’t understand what was going on. Where was all the grass?’
OMG!! So what’s happening is that supernatural forces have caused an October blizzard and everything is covered with snow, including the grass that whatshisname up there is finding so mystifying. Is this an argument for the idea that marijuana kills brain cells?
84% – ‘There was nothing to say. There was nothing to do. We were trapped with no way out, and he had a very, very big whip.
“My bag, chickens,” he roared. “Where is it?”‘
Really?! He called them ‘chickens’? That’s so unlikely considering the context and his previous behaviour (including the lopping of a teenage girl’s ear).
There were other instances of awkward dialogue, stilted writing, ‘bare’ instead of ‘bear’, but I decided that half an hour was enough time to spend on this review so that’s it from me. I would have to get a five star recommendation from a trusted friend before reading another Odentz book.