The Horrible Bag of Terrible Things #1
The Horrible Bag series, Book 1
Rob Renzetti
Penguin Workshop
Fiction, MG Fantasy/Horror
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: The ugly old black leather bag on the doorstep moaned; Zenith is sure of it. He doesn't know where it came from or who it was for or why it was left in front of the house, but he knows that it moaned when he first saw it. When he tries to pick it up, it pricks his finger - and seems to wake up, disgorging a monstrous thing of slime and hair and too many legs around a darkly beating heart. This is the last thing a boy who's already been grounded for mischief-making needs... and when the "shlurp" grabs his older sister and babysitter, Apogee, and pulls her back into the bag, Zenith has to get her back. Thus he finds himself leaping into the land of GrahBag, a world of surreal horrors, where every monster is worse than the last and even "friends" may turn out to be foes.
REVIEW: I needed a palate cleanser after the previous disappointing audiobook, and this looked like a quick way to fill out the rest of a work shift, having a great title that promised spooky shenanigans. Happily, it delivers in full.
Kicking off from the first sentence of the first page, the boy Zenith finds himself with a monstrous bag to deal with... and, soon, a monster from within the monstrous bag. Almost as bad is Apogee, the sister he used to be close to until an incident a few years back that transformed her from his comrade-in-mischief to a preteen prison guard/third parent who would rather lecture him about responsibility than play. As creeped out as Zenith is by the bag and the "shlurp" monster, he's initially more worried about how letting a horrible bag into the house will affect his grounding sentence, even as he wishes he could still confide in his sister. Before long, the matter is taken out of her hands when Apogee is abducted. Zenith wastes little time jumping into the bag afterward... and if he found the outside creepy, with its mismatched assortment of hides and leathers, the inside is even worse... and that's before he makes the transition to GrahBag proper, a place that makes nightmares seem downright quaint. Zenith tries to outwit and outthink the place, but the land of the sickly green skies and red sun always seems to have another twisted trick up its sleeve, and even when he thinks he's getting ahead, he may be digging himself into more trouble. He picks up a companion of sorts in the form of a little gargoyle, but he can't expect others to fight his battles or solve his problems. Nor is Apogee entirely helpless or stupid. The pacing's pretty quick (as one would expect from a middle grade title) and there are a few fun moments (and a few bits of crude humor - again, as one comes to expect from middle grade), but it also has genuinely creepy encounters and moments where Zenith must confront his own mistakes and fallibility. The ending sets up the conflict for the second book nicely, doing a good enough job baiting the hook that I've already downloaded the next two titles in the trilogy.
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