3/7/2013- Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Hello! I'm back in the high school library today, and I just finished reading another off-the-shelves lunch break book! Today's choice, Coraline by Neil Gaiman, went much better for me than Game Over (see my post from Monday) had. A few years ago, I saw the movie that was based on Coraline and really enjoyed it, which was why I decided to read the book. I can't remember the movie as well as I should, but I remember it well enough to know that the book is quite different. It's very short, so there are fewer characters and fewer things that happen, which isn't a bad thing at all. The basic story, about Coraline getting bored and wandering into an alternate world where she finds strange versions of her parents that want to stop her from leaving and replace her eyes with buttons, is pretty much the same. As the book is more streamlined than the movie is, however, that makes it even more creepy and disturbing. Without the minor characters and showy scenes, the whole thing focuses strictly on Coraline and how she manages to work through being terrified to solve some major problems, which is very effective.

It probably doesn't need to be stated directly, but I'd have a much easier time recommending Coraline to a student that wanted a quick book to read than I would Game Over. It may not have all of the Satan-opening-an-arcade murder flashiness, but by actually being about its main character and how she feels, it manages to be much more unsettling. Of course, it also helps that Coraline isn't nearly as idiotic as Game Over is, which didn't hurt matters. If I find another book even close to as interesting on my next high school library lunch break, I will be happy.

3/4/2013- Game Over by Joseph Locke

I mentioned in my last post that I planned to read a bad and outdated novel about video games that I found as I was subbing in a high school library, so, over my lunch break, I did just that. However, Game Over by Joseph Locke is not just an outdated book about video games. It is also, without any warning whatsoever from the outside of the novel, an outdated book about Satan opening an arcade where angry teenagers pretend to kill each other so often that they actually start doing it. It was every bit as bad as I expected, and I don't really see how, with so much focus being on either the promise of God's salvation (or the power of a possibly magical local youth pastor), the author could have justified the fact that this book contains some of the most bizarre and horrific murders that I've recently seen in print. True, the fact that it was as subtle about its Christian leanings as a cereal commercial is about the benefits of getting up and eating a pound of solid sugar is makes it so there was no mistake about what side the author fell on in the God vs. Satan debate, but the uses of household tools (and the axes that all of the parents in this town seemed to decorate with) hardly made me think of spending a morning in church. I was also, admittedly, disappointed in the fact that, since the games were powered by Hell itself, there were no details about the technology used to run the devil's own arcade.

I cannot say much in defense of Game Over, since it was an oddly written and bizarre plea for specifically Christian salvation that ended more quickly than any of the free eBooks I've read that seem to exist solely for the purpose of getting you to buy the rest of the series ever have. If you feel the need to read a book about the devil ripping a small town to shreds with an early-90s video arcade, however, I have no way of preventing you from finding Game Over for yourself. At the very least, it's short enough that sitting down to read it won't take up too much of your time.