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- Author: Patrick Carman
- Title: Skeleton Creek
- Publisher: Scholastic
As with most ghost stories, I was hesitant to read this one. I warned Patrick Carman that well, he might not like the conclusions I came to. I make it no secret I am a skeptic. There are few things outside of fantasy a majority of people take seriously. People don’t truly believe in dragons or unicorns or trolls or fairies, but boy do people believe in ghosts and haunting. I find most of it ridiculous thanks in large part of the shows about ghosts that feature on channels like sci/fi. Ghosts are not science fiction; they’re just fiction. Most of the time they get paired with religion, to my constant horror and woe, as people seek SALVATION from the EVIL SPIRITS. It’s all so hokey and overblown and clear that most ghost stories are shills for religion. I don’t need to be converted today, thanks, Casper.
(Aside: who loved Casper? Oh, Devon Sawa…you were so dreamy.)
I feared I would get the same from this book. Videos and ghosts; like TAPS, but in book form. When I read the premise and visited this site warning bells started to go off in my head. Combining these things is a match made in madness. I thought, “Wonderful, an entire split media project showing a bunch of grainy, barely-there hints of something supernatural. Just what I’ve always wanted.”
I’m hypocritical; I watch and love shows like Supernatural because it brings along some consequences and does an okay job of leaving out the meanderings about Jesus. Nothing gets me to throw down a story faster than holy-ghosting it up. It’s not just stuff moving around and regular people scared by their own imaginations and then bringing in priests or worse (PSYCHICS) to cleanse their homes. There’s blood and guts and fallout and true horror. I live in fear of ghost stories not because they’re scary, but because they fail to own their fantasy elements and take themselves too seriously. They rely on scare tactics to operate to distract people: flashing lights, sudden loud noises and pareidolia. Oh, the pareidolia.
You’re fiction, guys. Embrace it.
Everyone can imagine how successful those tricks are going to be on me! It’s like a cheap date who gropes you inappropriately. Not impressed.
I thought I would dislike the story as per my automatic assumption everything is bad until it comes along and proves to me through old fashioned being awesome that it’s definitely not bad. I know, I know, it’s a cruel and cynical way to view the world, going around looking at everything like it’s a pile, but it saves me heartache when I am inevitably disappointed. I could roll off the list of things I thought would be awesome that ended up breaking my poor fangirl heart. Better to be cautious.
Operating this way has the benefit of leaving me fucking impressed when something is actually as good as it claims to be. For the record, Skeleton Creek is pretty awesome; it does what it sets out to do really well. It might even kick some ass.
Yeah, I’ll say it: I was planning be horrified and disappointed and I ended up pleased and bemused. It wasn’t total crap? Wait, did I read the right book? This story brought me back from the brink of Split Media Disembowelment. I have some ideas of why it managed to do it that have less to do with me being easy and more to do with how the story is structured. I had problems, sure: the awkwardness of some of the supporting characters, the gratuitous abuse of Poe (really?), the terrible acting by anyone who wasn’t Sarah…but who cares! There was an awesome mystery here, guys! There were some shady characters! There was effective foreshadowing! There was only a little force-feeding of the details!
The plot: Ryan is house-bound after an accident involving a dredge, his friend Sarah and failed super-sleuthing. His leg is out of commission, he has a wicked cast and a head wound and his parents, together with Sarah’s parents, decide that he and Sarah are not good for each other. Too much chemistry, too much trouble and too big a chance that instead of acting like normal teens and having wild sex in the woods they’ll go to the woods instead to wander around an abandoned dredge and die horrifically.
Note: I spent the first half of my reading picturing these guys every time Sarah mentioned the dredge:
Note: these are Drej, not a dredge. However, upon revisiting my old baddie friends from Titan A.E., (The Drej! They’re pure energy!) I said, “wow, these main characters actually have something in common.” That’s a big fat spoiler right there, but the similarities! They’re uncanny. Someone who has seen this film and read this book needs to come have this discussion with me. I’m awed! I am also impressed that the Titan A.E. folks could have been saying something about ENVIRONMENT DESTROYERS. Unlike Ryan, I love technology.
Ryan seems an odd stick to be in the mess. I don’t want to call him a coward because he was in a position to get hurt in the first place by being somewhere dangerous at night. However, after I met him and watched Sarah’s first video I quickly realized that probably there was more to Ryan’s parents keeping him away from Sarah than just wild and crazy late-night adventures. It was interesting: a kid brave only in context of his headstrong, stubborn female best friend. As Ryan continues to write and Sarah keeps sending him videos the real mystery begins to take shape. I was pleased with the mystery of the town that Sarah and Ryan uncover as it implicates people they know and points to dangers bigger than ghosts. The best part wasn’t the ghost giving Sarah the eye or picking on a lonely, forgotten video camera (note: scare tactic fail) or generally being an asshole: no, it’s everything that happens outside the dredge. Carman did a bang up job of laying down solid foundations for the suspense in this story, starting with Ryan and Sarah’s first attempt to discover the secrets of the dredge up until the revelation that perhaps there’s not just one ghost in town, but several—none of which want to be discovered and one that must have made loads of prank calls in his day (totally had the breathing thing down).
Skeleton Creek is a character in its own right. I’m a sucker for towns-as-characters, especially small towns with big secrets. See: Hot Fuzz (bonus bro-mance) or Three Bags Full (sheepish shenanigans).
I was concerned about the acting before I started this, but I needn’t have worried because Sarah is flat out awesome in her videos. I can’t say the same about the other characters we see. We meet Ryan once, but the other character was trying so hard I felt he was going to break the fourth wall with his face. I’ve watched plenty of awesome acting and plenty of really bad low-budget B-movies and I think the actors in the B-movies were coming out on top if we wanted to do a comparison. Sound more fake, please! I’m sure it will help lend relevance to the piece of media you are making look like a joke.
TL;DR about the split media: I am not convinced this is the Next Era of Story-telling. I agree that it’s a neat way to bridge the gap between print and the world of the internet and video, but it’s not going to change the way the majority of people read books, even kids who tend not to read because they’re making Youtube videos or watching porn on Xtube. The Kindle hasn’t been The Second Coming of Literacy, either. The idea buys into a fallacy that all kids are plugged in. This just isn’t true: I work with many high school kids who don’t have the internet available at all who are just going to see this book as something out of reach. It’s one thing for middle class white kids to get excited about this book and another thing for low-income kids or kids like Ryan, who says he hates technology, to get excited about this book. Kids would need to identify with his technological aversion and to do that they would need the book which turns them off because of technological aversions. I get just as boggled when someone tells me they hate using the internet. I know, right? It happens so often here; they do exist! Okay, so most of them are mouth-breathers and lost to the twin traditions of hunting trips with beer and early fatherhood, but they exist. Much like Sarah and Ryan have to work and follow clues this book asks the reader to do the same thing and this is just not going to be popular with people who don’t use the internet in a very particular way. I would love to be proven wrong!
Meanwhile, I think this particular story works well with the videos because of the plot; it caters to it. Ryan and Sarah are separated. It feels natural to the situation; I’m not sure it would work otherwise. That’s not something that can be switched to different premises over and over. This format is a bit of a one-trick pony for the series unless it can be rebooted. I was pleasantly surprised I didn’t get tired of the back-and-forth, though. Plus!
The clues Sarah and Ryan find were the most fun. They both developed theories about what the clues meant. On one hand, sure, okay, they’re smart kids. On the other, they’re not Sherlock Holmes. Let’s not make the search so straight forward. Their habit of hitting so close to the truth right off the bat had the side-effect of me figuring out most of what was going to go down halfway through the book. I let this go because I made a discovery about myself. Some people have a furry fetishes. Some people have leather and rope fetishes. Others like to collect thousands of terrifying dolls. I apparently have A Thing for secret societies. I’m the freak in the corner drooling over the copy of Inside Secret Societies: What They Don’t Want You to Know which I can’t afford. The best part of this book for me was the fact that all the most terrifying bits had nothing at all to do with ghosts, but the people left behind.
Here’s how I felt about the end:
bottle_of_shine: I died inside a little. I did not hang on the cliff. I was BRUTALLY SHOVED OFF.
owlmoose: aaaaaaaaah *splat*
bottle_of_shine: pretty much
Is the ending too aggravating? It depends on how much people like open-ended stories. I don’t mind them, but I’m a fanfic writer. I spend most of my spare time extrapolating from whatever canon I’m living in at the moment. At the very least, the clues are enough for the conscious reader to piece together the puzzle and then turn it around like a four-dimensional Rubix cube, but I can hear the outraged screams already.
Congratulations, Patrick Carman. You have written a really great mystery that is actually saying something and a ghost story that I do not want to set on fire (although that church channel thing was pushing it for me). Sweet.
Media mentioned/used in this review:
- 200 Bad Comics
- Casper
- Supernatural
- Titan A.E.
- Hot Fuzz
- Three Bags Full: A Sheep Detective Story
- Inside Secret Societies: What They Don’t Want You to Know
