Saturday, January 12, 2008

Wicked Dead: Lurker by Stefan Petrucha and Thomas Pendleton

This book is the first in a new series about one story a "ghost girl" tells her three "ghost" friends in "a nightly ritual." I put that in italics because you don't even realize that the girls are ghost until the very end and, even then, the revelation isn't even that exciting. I didn't feel as if these ghost girls added anything to the story. In fact, I might even venture to say they killed the ending. The Prologue and the Epilogue could have been removed from the story and nothing would have been lost.

The story being told was about a teenager named Mandy dealing with a break up around the time a classmate is murdered. Soon after the girl's murder, Mandy starts to receive IMs from a boy named Kyle. She quickly develops a friendship with him, reassured that he's not a creep because he sent her a personalized picture (although the picture does seem to pull a Dorian Gray). Her boyfriend that she just broke up with tries to win her back and right after that happens, her Internet buddy starts to get creepy.

The above summary didn't sound that scary because the novel was a big disappointment. Sure Mandy was nervous walking around the neighborhood at dark - some girl was just brutally murdered, anyone would be scared. Yes she got two eerie text messages, but as a reader it wasn't enough to give me nightmares. The ending of the story (before the epilogue) was the only truly "scary" part and the was only a few pages. There is a bit of a subliminal message about the risks of teens dependency on technology which was interesting but I wouldn't call this novel worthwhile. The vast majority of the book was just about a girl's pursuit of a boy. The scares were too few with too far apart, therefore killing it's mojo.

After reading this first book, I don't have any interest in continuing this series. The ghost girls telling stories had no pull and the story told wasn't even that scary. I picked up the book looking for a thrill and came out deadly disappointed.
MMK

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