Give Me Something Good to Eat

A decades-old witch’s spell holds a small town in peril in this sardonic and terrifying thriller by Gillespie (One by One, for adults), a children’s debut. Seventh grader Mason Miller, an Evil Dead enthusiast and resident of Pearl, N.C., is suspicious of his town’s fanatical devotion to Halloween night. Even close confidant Serge—a charismatic, athletic foil to Mason’s brooding nerd persona—shrugs off Mason’s insistence that each year a child disappears and is scrubbed from the town’s collective memory. When Mason’s nine-year-old sister Meg is snatched by a scarecrow, the boys, along with two other classmates, give chase and find themselves pulled into a gruesome monster realm known as UnderPearl. The quartet’s race to find Meg before she succumbs to a witch’s spell lends itself to an effective and well-worn adventure narrative with a thoughtfully rendered resolution that gives an otherwise familiar tale some unexpected panache. Gillespie’s writing shines, however, in the shiver-inducing descriptions of the ghouls the team encounter, including “oddly cute” skinless blobs, a reluctant pumpkin-headed henchman, and, in one showstopping scene of cosmic horror, eyeless triplets. Serge is described as having “dark-brown” skin; Mason reads as white. Ages 8–12. Agent: Aimee Ashcraft, Brower Literary. (Aug.)