No Place for Monsters
by Kory Merritt
HMH Books for Young Readers, 2020
384 pages
Middle Grade (8 and up)
Kory Merritt returns with his sarcastic, comedic twist on family-styled Lovecraftian horror in this creepy adventure filled with lavish illustrations that accompany easy-to-read, gripping text. It’s not exactly a full-length graphic novel, but close enough that you won’t notice the difference, especially since Merritt’s crazy creatures climb over and through them across the page. His unique artistic style and his nods to icons of horror popular culture make this a ride that carries the fun into the rest of your day.
Levi Fogle teams up with Kat Bomgard, the weird girl from his class who is the only one who believes him when he says his little sister has gone missing. In fact, Twila has been vanished! Her stuff is gone, her parents have no memory of her, even the family photos have lost her image overnight!
As they explore the mystery and try to find Twila, Levi and Kat discover there is a hidden underside to their town populated with cryptids like a chupacabra and the huge, chained beast called The Heckbender! The ringleader of this dark underside is none other than Mr. Slynderfell, magnate and owner of the local ice cream factory. Slyderfell has organized the wild things of the neighborhood of Cowslip Grove into a corporate child-stealing machine for the Boojum, a creature who encapsulates his prey in a world of sleep and feeds off their dreams.
The pair of protagonists find aid in an unlikely place: the couple who own the house with the unkempt garden that chase kids off their lawn! Alas! They are betrayed by the chupacabra named Willow. Will they be able to defeat the evil ice cream empire? Just when you think the story is about to wrap up, Kat sacrifices herself in order to bring Twila back. Will she be forgotten?
The story moves at a fast enough pace that it’s hard to put down, but long enough to last more than a single sitting. Merritt’s world building is as rich as his character development, and I feel for the imaginative and artistic Kat when we discover her father is kind of a jerk and for poor Levi who has lost his sister. Cowslip grove could be any small town, I only wish my local ice cream truck were driven by a creepy villain like Rafer Frost!
