The Clackity and The Nighthouse Keeper

By -


 The Clackity, by Lora Senf
The Nighthouse Keeper

I was recommended this title by Leila at Bookshelves of Doom, who is on Substack now.  I'm so glad I read it, and I can't wait to get my hands on The Loneliest Place, the final book in the Blight Harbor trilogy, which comes out soon.

Blight Harbor is the seventh-most-haunted town in America, so Evie has become familiar with the supernatural since she moved to town a few years ago to live with her Aunt Des.  But she's never been allowed to explore the old abattoir on the other side of town; that place is haunted in a very bad way.  Des, however, has a job to do there, and Evie witnesses her disappearance.  To get Des back, Evie has to make a deal with the Clackity, the monster that inhabits the place, and go through to the other side of reality on a quest.

Under a dark sun, Evie has just hours to find her way through seven houses and rescue her aunt from the even worse monster pursuing her.  She has a few tools to use, and her friend Bird to help.  She'll need all her wits about her to survive, and the Clackity will cheat her if it can.

_______________________

Just a few weeks later, the resident ghosts of Blight Harbor -- beloved members of the community -- start disappearing.  They didn't even say goodbye!  Did they go on, like they're eventually supposed to, or were they taken?

Evie has promised not to get herself into another Dark Sun Side situation, but she is tricked through a door by the Nighthouse Keeper, who has been stealing ghost souls and generally operating as a problem even by the rules of this place.  Evie meets Lark, a ghost who has been trapped there for the past century, and Lark's spider friend Clyde, and together they journey to the Nighthouse in a desperate attempt to save Evie's friends before it's too late.

This is a great story!  Super spooky and scary -- this is a middle-grade novel, for about 10+.  Senf gives a shout-out to John Bellairs, which I appreciated, and Evie's story is in a similar spirit.  Loved it.  Read this! 


Comments

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more