Extremities

May 15, 2013
Prolific novelist and short story writer Lubar offers up a baker's dozen of stories too gruesome for his six (so far) Weenies collections. A sadistic gym teacher pushes a student with asthma until she's sent to the hospital, and the girl's friends exact revenge by forcing the teacher to run the track with a bag over her head. Two young teens are caught in a late-night convenience-store robbery. When the masked gunmen take the boys hostage, one of the boy uses a startling, literally bloody power to turn the tables. A young couple tries to stow away on a cruise ship for a free vacation but find they have boarded Pyre Cruise Lines rather than Pace Cruise Lines...and you can guess what happens next. When a teen lets a nerdy (and annoying) classmate drown in a local quarry instead of helping, he finds every molecule of water out for revenge. In an author's note, Lubar states the stories herein are "not...for children": They are "too dark, too heartless, or...too evil, for [his] young readers"--which, of course, will make them all the more attractive to his Weenie audience. Sophisticated readers or those well-versed in Lubar's usual twists will see several endings coming, and a few entries show their age technologically (an element also discussed in the author's note). A bit less humor than past collections, but fans will enjoy the grue. (Short stories/horror. 11-16)

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June 1, 2013

Gr 9 Up-Many of these stories were previous published in other collections, and are brought together here for the first time. The teen characters face ghosts, monsters, haunted houses, and murder. Some selections have a realistic premise. In "Apparent Motives," a boy creates a plan to kill his father and make it look as though the man ran away, but the trail leads the police straight to his mother. Other stories have more occult appeal. In "Blood Magic," two boys find themselves in the middle of a robbery and are taken hostage. Eddie's plan to escape is to use monsters he creates with his own blood to kill their captors. All he has to do is start bleeding enough to create them. The content gets pretty graphic so this book is best suited for an older audience. Most of these tales are short enough to memorize and tell around a campfire. A solid choice for collections in need of more horror stories.-Erik Carlson, White Plains Public Library, NY

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2013
Grades 8-11 Definitely not for the faint of heart or easily scared, Lubar's latest collection of the macabre and cruel is designed to make the hairs on the back of one's neck stand upand they do. Opening with a gasping wheeze, Running Out of Air takes the classic hated-teacher, subjugated-students scenario and spins an ending far more ghastly than anything Teaching Mrs. Tingle dreamed up. In Split Decision, a boy's hatred of the baby soon to be born to his father and his father's new wife casts an eerie echo of the rending finale. Feelings plays off the succubus myth, building slowly to an unexpected twist ending. The endless reality-show craze is mined in Patterns of Fear when an arrogant young participant matches wits with his opponents in a so-called haunted house. Although most of the 13 stories are quite brief, Lubar employs savvy language skills that milk every possible drop of horror out of a few words in this compulsively readable collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)