Trick or Treat – Richie Tankersley Cusick

Well we are going from one extreme to the other on Savidge Reads. Yesterday we had the latest Persephone Project instalment, the diaries of a victim of the holocaust, now today we have the first in the Point Horror Book Club organised by the lovely James Dawson. Some might see this as going from the sublime to the ridiculous. Well, that is how we roll here at Savidge Reads as, after all, we all like to read a wide range of varied material don’t we? I have to say reading ‘Trick or Treat’, by Richie Tankersley Cusick which was also the 6^th ever (out of hundreds) Point Horror novel, has been a chilling, comforting, nostalgic and occasionally laugh out loud experience.

**** Scholastic Books, paperback, 1989, fiction, 209 pages, from my own personal TBR

As ‘Trick or Treat’ opens, our heroine (though this becomes debatable, as she is a bit of a pain in the arse – more on that later) Martha has been uprooted from her life in Chicago as her father, only two years after the death of his wife and Martha’s mother, has married (via elopement, shock horror) Sally and so now they are all moving in together, with Sally’s son Conor, to a house in the arse end of nowhere that is very creepy and resides between a wood and a cemetery. Once there Martha feels an extra specially spooky coldness in her room, as if something awful happened in there, and soon enough she starts getting strange phone calls. Could this be to do with the not so distant murder of the young girl, Elizabeth, whose room it was and who Martha looks rather spookily like? (Erm, yes!)

‘The phone rang.
With a surge of relief Martha remembered that Blake was going to call, and she raced for the phone before Conor could answer it.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Elizabeth,” the voice whispered.
And it wasn’t Blake who drew a long, raspy breath… and let it out again… breathing… breathing… while her heart beat like a frantic wing in her throat.
“Who – who is this?”
It wasn’t Blake who began to laugh and then suddenly went quiet – the awful, terrible silence going on and on forever…
“Hello/” Martha cried. “Who is this!”
“You’re dead, Elizabeth. Trick or treat.”’

Now to be fair, if this happened to me I would be quite miffed. Yet Martha practically screams (and scream she does a lot, or often ends on the verge of a scream, hand clasped to mouth) VICTIM. She’s clearly very hormonal and full of teenage angst, mainly hating everyone in the world she finds herself and yet wondering why she can’t make many friends. A mystery that isn’t it?

Fortunately she is fairly pretty and the local heart throb, Blake, takes a shine to her. In fact many men seem to fall for her – it must be her almost constant fear of everything and blonde hair – even one of her teachers (who is Blake’s cousin) and possibly her own stepbrother seem strangely besotted with her. Ewww. Mind you, one of them is most likely a murderer, so not really a catch after all. I have to say if I had spent much time with her I might have been tempted to become a psychopath myself and wanted to kill her, so I started to thoroughly enjoy her torment and whoever was causing it the more the book went on.

To be serious for a moment (all adopt serious faces please, right now) I have to admit that Richie Tankersley Cusick, who shall be known from now as RTC to save my fingers, is bloody (see what I did there, oh no serious face again) good at creating a real sense of unease. She makes an old spooky house really spooky, a school late one evening very threatening and I did genuinely get chills and thrills as I was reading along.

 ‘“The house looked strangely ghostlike, rising through pale wisps of fog, its dark stone walls and chimneys interwoven with bare, twisted trees. Silhouetted there in the twilight, its gables crawled with dead ivy, it’s tattered awnings drooping like eyelids hiding secrets. Like something in a dream, not quite real. Not quite safe…”’

I also did rather a lot of laughing, in a nice way. The younger me who read these, and I am sure I read this one back in the day though it is a fuzzy memory, would have been revelling half thrilled and half horrified in the melodrama of it all. Now, as a 31 year old, part of me was still scared (no, really, I was – delightfully so) but part of me just laughed at the camp nature of it all.

‘“I’m dead,” Martha whispered, and she began to cry, and Conor held her tighter and rocked her.
“No. It was only a nightmare. Go back to sleep.”
“I’m scared,” Martha said, her voice was muffled against his bare shoulder, and sleep was a deep, deep sea, pulling her down.’

See isn’t Martha a drama queen? Honestly, tut – she had only seen a shadow! I think we all know who Martha grew up to be don’t we?

I am so, so glad that the lovely James of Dawson has decided to start this book group/challenge. I had forgotten the world where everyone drove a ‘station wagon’ (which I thought every American owned and was so jealous we just had a Nissan Micra), where your teachers were “boyishly handsome”, where all the boys were “so strong, yet so tender” often running “hands through thick, tawny hair” and where your parents were writers and artists and just buggered off for weeks leaving you alone at the hands of a psychopath! Honestly… it is compulsive reading, you can see why I loved them can’t you?  They are like the horror of Stephen King meets the camper jumpy horror of the Scream films meets the gothic of Rebecca meets teenage Mills and Boon meets Scooby Doo. Genius! If you haven’t read one you really should just for the experience and ‘Trick or Treat’ ticks all the Point Horror boxes. You’ll be chilled, thrilled, laugh a lot and just really enjoy yourself, what could be better in a book than that. I can’t wait for R.L. Stine’s (the God of Point Horror) ‘The Baby-sitter’ on the 13^th of next month.

Speaking of enjoyment, I have really enjoyed reviewing this book. I am pondering if I should make all my reviews like this, slightly sarcastic yet good humouredly so, what do you think? Back to Point Horror’s though, who else read this – either as a teenager or an adult – and what did you think? (Do not forget to read, and comment on, James’ hilarious review of this book.) Will you be joining in for more frightening frolics as we go?