Ever pictured your own funeral? You won’t be able to help it when you read some of the stories in this nightmarish collection, where things are never what they appear. Funerals are just the beginning. How about a day at the beach that ends in a mischievous murder? Or a cell phone that has a direct dial to . . . the dead?
From the creator of the blockbuster Alex Rider Adventures and The Diamond Brothers Mysteries comes eight more fantastically frightening tales. Whatever you do, don’t take this book to bed with you!
Anthony Horowitz's life might have been copied from the pages of Charles Dickens or the Brothers Grimm. Born in 1956 in Stanmore, Middlesex, to a family of wealth and status, Anthony was raised by nannies, surrounded by servants and chauffeurs. His father, a wealthy businessman, was, says Mr. Horowitz, "a fixer for Harold Wilson." What that means exactly is unclear -- "My father was a very secretive man," he says-- so an aura of suspicion and mystery surrounds both the word and the man. As unlikely as it might seem, Anthony's father, threatened with bankruptcy, withdrew all of his money from Swiss bank accounts in Zurich and deposited it in another account under a false name and then promptly died. His mother searched unsuccessfully for years in attempt to find the money, but it was never found. That too shaped Anthony's view of things. Today he says, "I think the only thing to do with money is spend it." His mother, whom he adored, eccentrically gave him a human skull for his 13th birthday. His grandmother, another Dickensian character, was mean-spirited and malevolent, a destructive force in his life. She was, he says, "a truly evil person", his first and worst arch villain. "My sister and I danced on her grave when she died," he now recalls. A miserably unhappy and overweight child, Anthony had nowhere to turn for solace. "Family meals," he recalls, "had calories running into the thousands&. I was an astoundingly large, round child&." At the age of eight he was sent off to boarding school, a standard practice of the times and class in which he was raised. While being away from home came as an enormous relief, the school itself, Orley Farm, was a grand guignol horror with a headmaster who flogged the boys till they bled. "Once the headmaster told me to stand up in assembly and in front of the whole school said, 'This boy is so stupid he will not be coming to Christmas games tomorrow.' I have never totally recovered." To relieve his misery and that of the other boys, he not unsurprisingly made up tales of astounding revenge and retribution.
Anthony Horowitz is perhaps the busiest writer in England. He has been writing since the age of eight, and professionally since the age of twenty. He writes in a comfortable shed in his garden for up to ten hours per day. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he has also written episodes of several popular TV crime series, including Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. He has written a television series Foyle's War, which recently aired in the United States, and he has written the libretto of a Broadway musical adapted from Dr. Seuss's book, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. His film script The Gathering has just finished production. And&oh yes&there are more Alex Rider novels in the works. Anthony has also written the Diamond Brothers series.
Read the title. DOWNRIGHT SCARY. It's just like that. I bought the book because at first I didn't think it was that bad, but after a few stories I didn't read it anymore. I actually got the Complete Horowitz Horror book, and it has all the stories contained in this one. This is kind of for an older group of people, and kids not used to horror stories would be better off fndng something else to read.
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This review is from: More Horowitz Horror (Hardcover)
"Horowitz Horror", and the sequel book "More Horowitz Horror", are simply written and all of the stories have simplistic plots. The reader can guess the outcome of any story in the first few pages. Both of these books are aimed at a pre-teen or early teen audience. The main characters range from 12 to 16 years of age. The plots resemble fables where the bad guys get their "just due" at the end. They are predictable and the characters are childlike in their simplicity.
I would recommend these books for pre-teens but adults will find them uninspiring and uninteresting. The authors writing ability is passable but his plots and characters are uninteresting. Unfortunately he does little research on his subject matter and there are factual errors in the books. One glaring error, in a story about a doomed airliner, suggests that the plane is destined to crash because the water from the plumbing system has leaked and frozen in the belly of the plane. The author then has the character say that "of course everyone knows that ice is heavier than water". Obviously the author flunked basic physics, chemistry and biology, because, in fact, ice is NOT heavier than water. Therefore the basic premise of the story is flawed. Poetic license aside, such technical errors reveal poor research, a lack of even a basic understanding of science and sloppy writing. Considering the fact that he is engaging a pre-teen audience, this must be considered a serious flaw.
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First Sentence:
Why did my father have to stop? I told him not to. Read the first pageKey Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Uncle Nigel, Twist Cottage, Saint Peter, Brierly Hall, Aunt Sara, Covent Garden, Geraldine Spencer, Mary Saunders, Burnt Oak, Eric Smith, Joan Barringer, George Spencer, Isle of Wight, Mark Fletcher, Ungle Nigel, Blade Street, Eric Saunders, Hyde Park, James Barringer, Jonathan Channon, Kate Evans, Linda James, Mark Adams, Orchard Books, Oxford Street
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