The Bad Guys #4: Attack of the
Zittens. By Aaron Blabey. Scholastic. $5.99.
Shadow House #3: No Way Out.
By Dan Poblocki. Scholastic. $12.99.
The fourth entry in Aaron
Blabey’s The Bad Guys series of
comic-strip books (not to be confused with graphic novels) picks up right where
the third left off and continues until the start of the still-to-come fifth
book. Clearly Blabey has hit his stride with this story of bad-reputation
characters now gone good – and their evil nemesis, the adorable but deranged
guinea-pig billionaire Dr. Rupert Marmalade. Actually, Blabey continues
expanding the cast of The Bad Guys in
Attack of the Zittens. The original
group included Mr. Wolf, Mr. Shark, Mr. Snake and Mr. Piranha. Then he added Legs,
a tarantula. And then Agent Fox, on whom Mr. Wolf has a crush because she is,
well, foxy. And now, in the fourth book, there is Granny Gumbo, on whom no one
has a crush because she is more likely to be the crusher than the crushee: she
is an alligator, a very toothy one who has a habit of losing her teeth (she
sneezes them out when she gets a whiff of Mr. Wolf, because she is “allergic to
mutt-dogs”). Agent Fox introduces the Bad Guys to Granny Gumbo, because Granny
is preparing an antidote for the plague of zittens visited upon the world by
Marmalade. These are not actually dead kittens revived but simply kittens that look like zombified kitties and have a
habit of chewing anything they can attach themselves to (notably Mr. Wolf).
Granny Gumbo’s antidote will de-zombify the zittens back into cute and cuddly
kitties, and all will be well, but she needs some snake venom for a final
ingredient; luckily, one of the Bad Guys is Mr. Snake, who provides the venom (not willingly). Meanwhile, back at Agent
Fox’s airplane, which for the time being is being piloted by Legs, Mr. Shark
and Mr. Piranha are headed for the island where Marmalade is hiding, with Mr.
Shark wearing one of his “perfect” disguises (a beak that is supposed to make
him look like a dolphin) and carrying Mr. Piranha in a fishbowl because Mr.
Piranha is a freshwater fish and cannot swim in the ocean (although, as Mr.
Snake points out before things really get going here, “a little salt in your
gills” does not seem like much when Mr. Piranha and Mr. Shark both spend most
of their time in these books walking around on land). Absurdity piles on
absurdity here, as in the three earlier books – for instance, Mr. Wolf, who is
absolutely determined not to be big and bad, insists on creating a “cowcatcher”
of cushions and pillows in front of Granny Gumbo’s truck so no zittens will be
injured “as we plough through them at high speed.” This leads Mr. Snake to
remark, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” but then, he has not
heard everything yet. Oh yes, there is still more to hear here (and see here),
including the use of Mr. Snake as a slingshot/catapult to toss balls of
antidote-soaked yarn to the milling zittens – and the reappearance of Marmalade
with a “cute-zilla ray” that will change “every cute and cuddly creature on the
planet into a drooling weapon of DESTRUCTION!” And that sets the stage for the next book in the series, which is going
to be out of this world. Not as to quality or plotting, just as to setting: its
focus will be the moon, from which the cute-zilla ray is being beamed. Stay
tuned (and readers who are thoroughly enjoying The Bad Guys certainly will).
“Enjoying” is not exactly
what readers do with Dan Poblocki’s Shadow
House trilogy, although those who like being scared – somewhat scared,
anyway – will be pleased with the third and last entry, No Way Out. This (+++) book is strictly for those who read the
first two in the series, The Gathering
and You Can’t Hide. Four largely
interchangeable characters – Azumi, Dash, Dylan and Poppy – continue to be
victimized here by someone or something that lured them to the house and has
trapped them in it. Actually, they do manage to get out in this book, but initially
only as far as the grounds of Larkspur House, which turn out to have frights,
ghosts and traps of their own. The best elements here, “best” meaning
“creepiest,” are the same as in the first two books: the cover, which is very
cleverly designed and genuinely scary, and the illustrations, which neatly call
on a variety of common fears (the portrait of three clowns near the start of No Way Out is especially eerie). The
writing, unfortunately, is nowhere close to the quality of the visuals. “Last
time something in the house asked us to play,
the Specials showed up and tried to kill us.” (To understand the Specials,
readers have to know the earlier books.) “It was a horror to imagine that he’d
lose it over something as simple as a carnival tent. But then nothing here was
simple.” “He couldn’t shake the feeling that this room, the game, and the
prizes might all be a trick.” “They poured toward him – a smoky liquid made of
shivering hands and teeth and hair.” “What if it’s all a distraction? What if
they’re working with the house to confuse us?” And so on, and so forth. Shadow House is all about working
together, along the lines of many, many series for preteens, and it is also
about trust and uncertainty and losing friends and regaining them: “Could they
trust each other again? Listening to the tinkling of the music box, he suddenly
felt like they might.” Characters die in the series, or at least disappear, but
they tend to come back after a while as it turns out they are not really dead and gone forever. What
Poblocki wants to do here is make things scary enough to keep readers wondering
what will happen next – but not as frightening as events would be in books for
older readers, for whom horror often involves gore, true terror, and genuine
no-coming-back death of protagonists (or at least of less-central characters). The
result of Poblocki’s approach is sometimes unintentionally funny, as in this
snippet of dialogue: “‘After all this, I’m not going to die in a flipping
fire!’ ‘You’d rather be eaten by a giant monster?’” But no humor is intended. Most
of the time, what goes on here is predictable – not the specifics, but
Poblocki’s authorial hand telling readers that there is about to be another bad thing happening to the
characters: “The door swung open and everything changed.” Eventually, and not
at all surprisingly, the kids escape, the house is destroyed, and the
characters remember that “each of them had been called to Larkspur because of
their connection with the dead” but that now “that connection had been severed”
and they can get on with their lives. This is not much of a conclusion and is
no revelation at all, and no character really grows in any significant way in
the Shadow House series. But growth
and character development are not the point here: Poblocki seeks only a
good-size helping of entertainment-through-terror (or at least through modest
scariness), and that is just what he delivers in No Way Out as he finally gives readers, after three books, a way
out.
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