Chris Woodingcontinues his exploration of deep, dark, scary otherworlds in his latest book for young adults, Malice, due from Scholastic in October 2009.
Like all good urban legends, it’s the thrill of the unknown that draws kids in: gather some odds & ends, chant a phrase 6 times, and then wait to see if Tall Jake comes for you. And then there’s a creepy, hard-to-find comic called Malice that details erratically horrifying snipets of kids trapped in a dangerous underworld, most of whom meet gruesome ends.
When one of their friends goes missing and then appears to die in the pages of Malice, Seth and Kady embark on a quest to stop Tall Jake and find themselves tangled in a web that was more complex and fearsome than they had originally suspected.
Wooding creates two worlds that are seemlessly connected via the comic book: the pages of comic that are inserted throughout the book further the story and reinforce the dual worlds. Characters and plot lines weave back and forth between the Malice world and the real world and the characters are aware of both worlds and the repercussions in each based on the actions they take. It’s a great idea to have 2 facets supporting the storytelling (Patrick Carman’s Skeleton Creek, for example), but I felt that art of the comic book is the least successful part of this book. Wooding’sstory telling is creepy and full of horror and compared side by side with it, the comic is childish and falls short of the potential it has to be a effectively scary part of the experience. The images should be sharper, scarier, and more sophisticated to match the horror of the book, and the fear they’re supposed to instill in the kids in the story (Ben Templesmith’s illustrations for Frank Beddor’s Hatter M graphic novel are a superb example of the kind of art that would have been great for Malice).
Despite this, as in The Haunting of Azaibel Cray, Wooding combines exceptional storytelling skills, quick, suspenseful plot sequences, and a creepy atmosphere, to create a horrific and haunting underworld where teen heroes battle menacing foes.
- Posted by Cori
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