Nightmare City

September 30, 2013
Suspense writer Klavan (If We Survive) switches to horror in a fast-paced and eerie tale that shows an awareness of the genre’s conventions and a willingness to play with readers’ expectations. High school journalist Tom Harding wakes up to find his house deserted, his SoCal neighborhood abandoned, and mysterious creatures after him. He has occasional contact with his too-good-to-be-true girlfriend, his newspaper editor, and a mysterious man who seems to control the monsters. He also sees visions of his brother, a deceased military hero, and a medical TV show with a strangely familiar patient. Interspersed with Tom’s struggle to escape, flashbacks explore the steroid scandal he reported on and the anger many school officials and athletes felt toward him. Readers will soon catch on to the cause of Tom’s predicament, but Klavan wisely shifts gears, focusing on Tom’s need for survival and his struggle to both discover and tell the truth. As the two plotlines converge, Klavan’s background in thrillers comes to the forefront, and the mysterious clues lead to elegant, intense chase sequences and a well-crafted mystery. Ages 12–up. Agent: Robert Gottlieb, Trident Media Group.

October 1, 2013
When intrepid teen reporter Tom Harding wakes in a fog- and monster-filled nightmare version of his Southern California town, his only ways out are truth or death. Through the central story of Tom's waking in the warped version of his town and flashback interludes of the weeks immediately preceding the primary narrative, Klavan (If We Survive, 2013, etc.) allows readers to piece together a spiritual mystery concerning what has happened in the time between the stories. In the interludes, Tom exposes his school's beloved championship football team's steroid use, gaining him both enemies and the admiration of his childhood crush. In the immediate narrative, Tom must discover what's happening before monsters kill him. The few other characters present adamantly give him conflicting advice--from the grave, in one case--through foreshadowed plot twists and betrayals. Fans of survival-horror video games will recognize story structures and motifs (cellphones, televisions and radios turning from innocuous to frightening); these techniques transfer well to the written medium. A memory-loss device is most effective in its first use but becomes tedious. The biggest weakness, however, comes in flat characters and virtuous Tom's weak emotional arc. Luckily, the creepy atmosphere ebbs and flows, keeping a good rhythm up until the very end--a tidy, if slightly campy wrap-up. Uneven but forgivable given how fast, easy and freaky it is. (Survival horror. 11-15)

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November 1, 2013
Grades 8-11 Klavan (The Last Thing I Remember, 2009; If We Survive, 2012) delivers another stand-up all-American teen hero in 17-year-old Tom, who wakes up one morning to find a world changed for the worse. Every other person has vanished, his cell phone is receiving mysterious transmissions, and lethal figures he calls malevolents are lurching out from a dense fog. Is this a zombie apocalypse? A bad dream? Purgatory? Slowly the answers come into focus with the arrival of three friends, who try to guide him, as well as the helpful voice of his brother Burt, who was killed six months ago in Afghanistan. The rules of Tom's world, or lack thereof, lend the plot a fiddly quality that never allows for high tension; the tale might have functioned better as a bizarro short story. That said, Klavan retains his James Pattersonlike gift for keeping pages turning, and the mystery behind it allhaving to do with Tom's school-newspaper expos' on the performance-enhancing drug use of the football teamis a juicy one, and well handled.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)