WELCOME TO FERAL

Feral is probably a nice town to live in—so long as you stay away from the playground tube slide after dark, that broken down ice cream truck in the woods, and the (shudder) middle school’s basement.

As collected and retold by deceptively genial local archivist Freya, the five incidents here mostly involve tweens doing something they may, or more likely may not, live to regret. For failing to turn in a book report, Agatha finds herself serving detention in a dim, doorless basement room where the clock ticks…but the time never changes. Likewise, Keller and Landon nerve themselves to dive into an old, twisty slide (despite the eerie screams that issue forth)…and have yet to emerge. “Your ice cream—it’s moving,” turn out to be a hiker’s last words as she and two friends become tasty snacks for a trio of toothy, tentacled horrors. And in the final tale, a troop of Ferret scouts turn the tables on their new troop leader, an overconfident vampire. Readers can track these episodes and anticipate others thanks to an opening map with lots of suggestive labels (“unidentified ruins,” “bog beast sightings,” etc.). In contrast to the popeyed young folk who have an ordinary look and come in a mix of skin colors and body types, the adult humans tend to be—or suddenly change into—menacing, green-skinned monsters. The more gruesome bits, though, are largely left for imaginations to supply.

Thrill-seeking readers will be eager to visit.