A spooky series starter with some unexpected depths.
Emrys Houtman has just moved to New Rotterdam, a contender for one of America’s Most Haunted Cities. Emrys has ADHD and anxiety, but while this sometimes makes it hard for him to focus, it also helps him to hyper-focus on things he finds stimulating. Still, he has often felt like like an outsider, and has high hopes for life in New Rotterdam. “In a place where weird is ordinary, maybe I’d finally fit in,” he explains. He becomes “a little obsessed” with compiling information about the city’s cryptids and creepypastas (horror legends) as part of the online New Rotterdam Wiki Project.
He already has a friend in town: Hazel, whom he met years ago at summer camp, and who shares his interest in the city’s oddities. Hazel’s other friend Serena (who happens to have two dads), on the other hand, isn’t quite sold on the supernatural.
Things go from speculative to real, however, when Hazel and Serena’s upstairs neighbor Mr. Van Stavern goes missing. In trying to rescue him, the three friends are transported to a mysterious space holding powerful, magical relics. Mr. Van Stavern himself has become trapped in the pages of a spell book, but can still talk. He tells the trio that they, like him, are now members of a secret society of occult investigators dedicated to protecting relics from dark forces. When the three return to New Rotterdam, they begin to sense that something is deeply wrong there. Children are going missing; some people appear to have horrifying visages instead of ordinary human faces. Can they learn to master their new powers in time to figure out what’s going on and put a stop to it?
The story gains depth and mystery via interstitial excerpts from the New Rotterdam Wiki Project and the messages among its contributors, which add not only details about the city’s strange inhabitants, but also drop clues related to the main tale. It’s a well-done device, and should engage young readers with a penchant for mysteries and/or online research. This is more than just a mystery tale, however, but slides into horror—and while the horror is age-appropriate, it does involve sudden deaths, monstrous figures hidden in a seemingly normal world, and a general eeriness and sense of impending doom. Readers who enjoy such things should love it, but it’s admittedly not for everyone.
The action of the tale is balanced by thoughtful development of the relationships among the main characters, and by Emrys’s journey to discovering that being “weird” isn’t a weakness but a strength—a message that should resonate with many readers.
Emrys and Hazel are both White. Serena and one of her dads are Black; her other dad and brother are described as Dominican, with brown skin. Mostly, her dads’ queerness is an incidental part of the tale, though at one point, she mentions a past incident when a church told one of her dads “that his ‘lifestyle’ would make people uncomfortable.” She uses this as an example of the “everyday kind of evil” in the town—a gentle reminder to readers that sometimes it isn’t only the literal monsters who are scary.
A recommended read with a clear hook for a sequel (and I have an unsubstantiated suspicion that we’ll see more queer characters in it). I can’t wait.
