Review: Attack of the Vampire Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales by David Lubar

May 23, 2011

Attack of the Vampire Weenies and Other Warped and Creepy Tales
Author: David Lubar
Publisher: Starscape (Tor)
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9780765323453
Publication date: 24 May 2011
Review book source: ARC sent by the publisher

Summary
From the publisher: A boy steals a ticket to an amusement park and gets the ride of a lifetime–literally. The first day of middle school turns into a free-for-all when the gym teacher offers a “get-out-of-gym-free” card. Sick of his sister’s vampire wannabe friends, a kid decides to teach them a lesson at their next party. But the tables are turned when some surprise guests show up. [...] David Lubar is back with thirty more warped and creepy tales for fans of his bestselling Weenies story collections [...]

My thoughts
Lubar’s stories draw on horror story and urban legend staples (ghosts, creepy abandoned houses, skeletons) as well as elements from kids’ day to day lives (school, sports, video games, lame older siblings) and the truly bizarre (mimes turned vampires, ants that become what they eat–and then hunger for more, and the perils of stealing cable from a witch). These elements are blended together with a healthy helping of humor to create a collection that will alternately creep you out and leave you chuckling.

The mix of horror and humor will keep kids reading, and the length of the stories (some as short as three pages) will reward reluctant readers. The shorter stories would also make great material for book talks to tweens, so take this with you when you visit schools to promote summer reading!

With many of the stories, some of the horror is in the initial cold chill when you realize what’s happening, but a lot of it also comes from contemplating what happens to the characters after the story is over. Many of the stories also end in such a way that you could ask, “What happens next?” to get kids telling some great stories of their own.

One of the delightfully silly passages I enjoyed comes from the setup for one of the fractured fairy tales in the collection:

A while ago–however long it actually was doesn’t really matter–a poor couple lived in a shack in the woods. They had enough money for a television, but they couldn’t afford cable. So they settled for watching the few shows they could catch on broadcast. When the wife learned she was going to have a baby, she got restless.

“Look there,” she said, pointing to the high walls that surrounded the witch’s home not far from their shack. “She has satellite TV. And all we have is broadcast.”

“I’ll fix that,” her husband said. He waited until night, then took his tools and sneaked over to the satellite dish. He spliced a second cable into the line and ran it to his shack.

“Now we can watch everything,” the husband said.

“Isn’t that stealing?” the wife asked.

“We’re not hurting anyone,” the husband said.

And so they settled down on the couch and watched the wonderful abundance of available satellite programming until their daughter was born.

Such fractured fairy tales, new urban legends, and stories about strange and freaky things that no one would ever believe happened if you told them are mixed in with the traditional horror or campfire stories. Some are scary, some capture your imagination and stick with you, and some serve as cautionary tales of the dangers of avarice, revenge, and too much reality television. With all of them, I like the possibilities and twists that Lubar sees when he looks at the world–and as a bonus, a section is included at the end of the book wherein Lubar explains his inspiration for each story, which I appreciated and suspect young readers would as well.

Other little things I enjoyed about this collection: there is a Gretchen in this book! There is a story (“Gee! Ography”) that is entirely built on geography puns! And there are a handful of times when the kids in the stories do something to find information–everything from simple Internet searches to grabbing an encyclopedia because it’s closer than the computer to months of research at the library on smells culminating in the creation of an anti-stink formula. And for the most part, the kids who know how to do research well succeed and the kids who don’t get eaten or meet some other hideous fate. How’s that for library propaganda?

I think my favorite story was “Chirp” (about a boy who can briefly turn into a bird when he says “chirp”) because I didn’t see the twist ending coming at all, but the one that really stuck with me, that really horrified me, was “Family Time,” in which a kid and his family gather for a game and he finds himself completely at a loss as to what the rules are or even the correct vocabulary to learn, despite his family’s insistence that they’ve played before and he must know. To me, that sounded too much like the dementia that I fear will be my fate in old age: I’ll have no idea what’s going on and no way to find out, despite everyone telling me things are totally normal. That’s terrifying.

Lubar’s latest Weenies book is warped and creepy, yes, but also also funny. While not every story is a total slam-dunk (or a home run or whatever other sports analogy you’d like), those that fall flat only seem so because they’re surrounded by clever stories that make you wonder “what if?” or “what next?” A great collection for your tweens. 4/5.

More reviews

• Alternative Worlds
• Pink Raygun
• Sellers Library Teens

Bonus: David Lubar wrote a piece for the Starscape blog on how to write your own Weenies story. He also provided an excerpt from the title story and directions on how to get a free copy of the book (sort of) on his LiveJournal.

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Tags: 4 star, children's books, david lubar, reviews, short stories, ya lit