By Katherine Arden
A creepy fall novel: Ollie, still aching over her mother's death, ends up stranded overnight in a place where scarecrows come alive and a smiling man collects the children who lose his bargains.
Ollie loves to read and mostly wants to be left alone since her mother died. Down by the river she takes a strange old book from a distraught woman, a book about two brothers, a girl, and a bargain struck with a mysterious smiling man. Then her class takes a bus trip to a farm at the edge of town, the bus breaks down at dusk, and the driver leaves her with a warning: avoid large, open places after dark, and keep to small spaces. As the fog comes in, the scarecrows in the fields begin to move, and Ollie and two classmates have to survive a night where the story in her book is coming true around them. Her broken watch keeps flashing one word: RUN.
This is where the trail leaves cartoon scares behind for real, patient dread, the kind that comes from atmosphere rather than gore. Arden writes beautifully, so a strong reader gets a properly frightening story that's also good, which makes it a satisfying step up from Goosebumps. Underneath the scares runs a quiet thread of grief, because Ollie is carrying her mother's death the whole way through, and that's part of why the book lands deeper than a monster romp.