Helpful Score: 1
**Warning: Some spoilers***
I don't know why but I love coming-of-age horror stories like Ghoul. Maybe it is the nostalgia factor, reliving memories of childhood summers. Things seemed so much scarier back then. Or it could be the underdog nature of a group of kids taking on a powerful evil enemy all on their own, without any adult help.
Coming-of-age stories have almost become a new horror sub-genre...'It' (King), 'Summer of Night' (Simmons), 'The Traveling Vampire Show' (Layman) and maybe 'A Boy's Life'(McCammon). Although I enjoyed reading Ghoul, I didn't feel like it quite lived up to the other coming of age horror I mentioned. A lot of attention was given to the real-life horrors that two of the boys suffered at home (i.e. abuse and molestation). I think the author was making a point about real-life sometimes being worse, but I felt like it overshadowed the horror elements so much that it took a lot of the thrill out of the story.
Also, Brian Keene is a great author but if there is one thing that bugs me about his novels, it is that so many of them end badly (as in unhappily) and way too abruptly. He writes great action scenes and characters that I really care about, but then he kills everybody and everything off in the last 5 or so pages. I kind of feel like Keene is saying to the reader "life is tough and there are no happy endings, so deal with it." Ghoul had a happier ending than most of the other Keene novels I've read, but I still felt let down at the end. The real-life monsters could never really be defeated, so there was no chance for the boys to truly win in the end. If only one of the boys could have overcome the horrors in their real life, maybe I would have been more satisfied.
All that said, Ghoul was good and I would recommend it. If I was grading it, I would give it a B-. I just wish the author could be a little more upbeat in his endings once in awhile.
I don't know why but I love coming-of-age horror stories like Ghoul. Maybe it is the nostalgia factor, reliving memories of childhood summers. Things seemed so much scarier back then. Or it could be the underdog nature of a group of kids taking on a powerful evil enemy all on their own, without any adult help.
Coming-of-age stories have almost become a new horror sub-genre...'It' (King), 'Summer of Night' (Simmons), 'The Traveling Vampire Show' (Layman) and maybe 'A Boy's Life'(McCammon). Although I enjoyed reading Ghoul, I didn't feel like it quite lived up to the other coming of age horror I mentioned. A lot of attention was given to the real-life horrors that two of the boys suffered at home (i.e. abuse and molestation). I think the author was making a point about real-life sometimes being worse, but I felt like it overshadowed the horror elements so much that it took a lot of the thrill out of the story.
Also, Brian Keene is a great author but if there is one thing that bugs me about his novels, it is that so many of them end badly (as in unhappily) and way too abruptly. He writes great action scenes and characters that I really care about, but then he kills everybody and everything off in the last 5 or so pages. I kind of feel like Keene is saying to the reader "life is tough and there are no happy endings, so deal with it." Ghoul had a happier ending than most of the other Keene novels I've read, but I still felt let down at the end. The real-life monsters could never really be defeated, so there was no chance for the boys to truly win in the end. If only one of the boys could have overcome the horrors in their real life, maybe I would have been more satisfied.
All that said, Ghoul was good and I would recommend it. If I was grading it, I would give it a B-. I just wish the author could be a little more upbeat in his endings once in awhile.
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