By: Rhett McLaughlin & Link Neal
Synopsis
From the book dust jacket:
It’s 1992 in Bleak Creek, North Carolina – a sleepy little place with all the trappings of an ordinary Southern town: two Baptist churches, friendly smiles coupled with silent judgments, and an unquenchable appetite for port products. Beneath the town’s cheerful facade, however, Bleak Creek teens live in constant fear of being sent to the Whitewood School, a local reformatory with a history of putting unruly youths back on the straight and narrow – a record so impeccable that almost everyone is willing to ignore the suspicious deaths that have occurred there over the past decade.
At first, high school freshmen Rex McClendon and Leif Nelson believe what they’ve been told: that the students’ strange demises were all just tragic accidents, the unfortunate consequence of succumbing to vices like Marlboro Lights and Nirvana. But when the shoot for their low-budget horror masterpiece, PolterDog, goes horribly awry – and their best friend, Alicia Boykins, is sent to Whitewood as punishment – Rex and Leif are forced to question everything they know about their unassuming hometown and its cherished school for delinquents.
Eager to rescue their friend, Rex and Leif pair up with recent NYU film school graduate Janine Blitstein to begin piecing together the unsettling truth of the school and its mysterious founder, Wayne Whitewood. What they find will leave them battling an evil beyond their wildest imaginations – one that will shake Bleak Creek to its core.
My Thoughts
I enjoyed this book. It’s an easy read and I read it in a day. It wasn’t really dark and creepy at all (which is good because I don’t typically like dark and creepy). Coming from a small Southern town, I felt the characters were believable enough though without much depth. The premise was interesting and kept my attention, but was also a little unfulfilling. I’m not overly critical, so a couple of minor plot holes here and there don’t bother me if I’m enjoying the book overall. However, this one did leave quite a few loose ends that would have been nice to have tied up. I would like to have learned what caused the spring to be cursed to begin with and what the spirit was that inhabited it; why the spring needed “lost causes” and Whitewood’s daughter in particular; and I wondered what ultimately happened to Whitewood and the other children in the spring. I also would have liked a better explanation of how Whitewood got all those people to go along with his scheme, what happened to the town afterwards with none of the other adults being held accountable, and what caused the unusual number of kidney stones the residents of Bleak Creek were experiencing. While it could have used a little more fleshing out and less loose ends, it was definitely a fun and enjoyable read.
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