The Fearsome Foursome

April 15, 2016
Librarian of the Haunted Mansion (and nominal "author") Amicus Ravenswood tries to outfright four 12-year-old tale spinners.Tim, Noah, Willa, and Steve call themselves the Fearsome Foursome. They all love the horror writing of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and convene every week at their clubhouse to try to outscare one another by telling frightening tales. One stormy day, their clubhouse is destroyed; in its place are four fancy invitations to an unfamiliar address. That evening they meet at the ornate gates of a sprawling estate and enter (at their own risk, of course) to find a creepy librarian ready to tell them eerie tales--four in all, each starring one of the Fearsome Foursome. Tim finds a cursed baseball glove. Willa wishes her pets back to life with a "gypsy" token. Noah grows some primordial life-forms in the backyard pool. And Steve gets caught in a deadly game of dare...or dare. Each tale has a grisly (if unbelievable) end, as does the collection. Esposito comes to books from film and TV, including R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour, and the four stories in this slick, scare-free package, narrated intrusively by cut-rate Crypt Keeper clone Ravenswood, could have been plucked from any tome in Jovial Bob's Goosebumps book brand. Final art by comic artist Jones not seen; the text does not paint the characters as notably diverse.Neither funny nor frightening, but it will have an audience. (Horror. 8-11)

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April 1, 2016

Gr 4-7-Middle schoolers Willa, Tim, Noah, and Steve bond over their love of horror and form The Fearsome Foursome, their storytelling club. They meet weekly to share tales of ghosts and ghouls. One day, their headquarters gets demolished in a freakish storm. In the wreckage, the quartet find four fancy invitations to an address on the other side of town. Intrigued, they find it's a Gothic mansion, which seems deserted except for the librarian, who is the keeper of all scary stories. It turns out the librarian has a story to read about each of them, and he insists they will be dying to find out how these tales end. This is the first in a new series based on the Disney theme park ride the Haunted Mansion. The selections are gruesome-some include rotting corpses-but are not too frightening for most middle grade readers. VERDICT An excellent addition for freshening up scary stories collections; hand this to fans who have graduated from "Goosebumps" or are looking for a new scare.-Beth Cuddy, Seward Elementary School, Auburn, NY

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2017
Four friends obsessed with scary stories answer a summons to an abandoned mansion, where ghostly librarian Amicus Ravenswood tells the children horrible tales about themselves. Based on Disney's Haunted Mansion ride, these stories-within-the-story are not very scary; the main draw is each friend's grisly demise. Black-and-white sketches reinforce the pseudo-somber tone, while a rather loose plot ties everything together and sets up future installments.

(Copyright 2017 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)