Straub, Peter: lost boy lost girl

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Fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill and his friend Jimbo Monaghan are, ostensibly, the kind of kids who are going nowhere--baggy-clothed and skateboard-appendaged, they slouch around their run-down neighborhood and say "yo" more often than their fathers would probably like. But beneath the attitude, the boys are surprisingly thoughtful and nobly loyal to one another, and Mark, at least, is intelligent, capable of using "dyad" in a sentence: 'Look, there's another cop!' Mark said. 'They come in, like, dyads.'" His intellect is a plus, since Mark has a lot to figure out in Peter Straub's tense and exceedingly creepy--don't read it if you're alone in the house creepy--lost boy lost girl.

After his mother's suicide (an instance of overkill, as it were, as the method she adopted was thrice effective), Mark's attempts to understand what happened to her land him in the thick of a family mystery and on the trail of a serial killer or two. His obsession leads Mark in particular to investigate an abandoned property directly behind his own house, a building every bit as creepy as Norman Bates's Victorian manse. The creepy goings-on in the house will have you almost screaming at Mark to get the hell out of there.

Part murder mystery, part ghost story, the book is actually diminished by its spectral nonsense, which renders the story less genuinely scary. The book's ending in particular is too unbelievable to be satisfying. Straub's novel nonetheless is well worth the read. Just remember to have a buddy with you when you crack it open.