The Lunatic's Curse
The Lunatic's Curseby F. E. Higgins
The town of Opum Oppidulum is home to the freezing Lake Beluarum and its rumored monster. On an island at the center of the lake is an asylum; no one has ever escaped it. So how will Rex, whose father, Ambrose Grammaticus, has been imprisoned there under false pretenses, prove that Ambrose is not insane? And if Rex can free his father, will his evil stepmother drive them both to madness? (goodreads.com)
I'm going to start off by saying that this is the perfect example of why I hate when publishers change the look of a book mid-series (not that this is really a series, but also, it is a series...). Part of my enjoyment of the books by F. E. Higgins was the binding and look of the book. If you click the links below you'll see them. Especially The Black Book of Secrets, where I specifically wrote about how awesome the binding of the book was. All the books have now been repackaged to look like the one above. Yes, they do look more middle-grade now, but I thought the old bindings were beautiful. This just looks generic to me.And now on to the story itself. It was creepy. Freaking creepy. There was something about this story that made my skin crawl.I sort of wish I had read it in October, if you're doing the RIP Challenge, this is one you might want to add to your list. (Heck, any of these Sinister City books you could add!)It did take me a little while to get into the story, however. As much as I liked Rex, I found the creepy tale to be a little unoriginal at the start. Things turned around as I kept reading though and I began to like it much better once Rex had arrived at the asylum. This is one of those stories where you can't trust anyone. I even suspected Rex's new friend Hildred for most of the book.Just like the other books from Higgins, there is loss and sadness mixed in with the creepy and mystery. This time I really felt the loss of one of the characters and I had hoped that their story wouldn't end that way. Alas, there are very few happy endings throughout these tales. Even if sometimes it might seem like there are. The towns - Urbs Umeda, Pagus Parvus and Opum Oppidulum are not places I would ever, ever, want to visit if they were real. These are not happy places.As with the other books, there are cross-over characters as well and I love this aspect of the series. Apparently one of the characters at the asylum was in The Eyeball Collector, but I can't recall the character from the other book right now. I'm going to have to go back and reread it at some point. I want to reread all of them, actually, to see what I recognize from other books as I now know more about the towns and people they discuss.Every so often I see the "Why aren't there enough books for boys out there?" question come up. If someone was looking for books for a middle grade boy who loved to read, I'd totally throw these books at them and laugh maniacally (because you sort of feel like you have to introduce them that way because they are the types of books that feel like they'd laugh maniacally if they could). There is no romance, there is creepy, there is mystery and these books are smart (very well-written). They are dark books though. These are not happily ever after tales. These are quite truthfully, sinister tales. And I love them.One last thing - I love all the names in these books, from the characters to the towns and lakes. Nothing is common and it gives the reader a real escape into a whole new world where things seem similar to ours, but something's just not quite right. Brilliant imagination flows from the pages of the novels and cocoons you while you read.(Thanks for the gift, sneaky book friend!)Tales From the Sinister City
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