Josh Allen’s debut book, Out to Get You, is a pleasant buffet of creepy fare for young readers. His style is reminiscent of classic horror and sci-fi stories like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. Allen presents a variety of tales of the weird, spooky, and spine-tingling variety. His stories are short enough to keep even the most reluctant and distracted young readers interested for the duration, yet he packs quite a bit into each in spite of their brevity. Each story has a unique setting that lends to the general air of eeriness and a main character with whom the reader finds it easy to relate. This book is a good choice for young readers and for older readers who want to revisit a time in their youth when monsters could lurk in everyday places and hiding under the covers was a viable solution to life’s problems.
Review of an Advance Reading Copy
This book was sent to Compass Book Ratings for review by Holiday House
Content Analysis:
Profanity/Language: None. Note: “Hell” is used a few times to refer to the place of eternal punishment (not tallied).
Violence/Gore: A few verbal threats; a character considers possible ways a person could die, with no details given; a joke is made about school lunch killing someone;report of broken bones in a sports accident; animals have various scars from previous wounds; fight in which a child is attacked by animals with no major wounds; character burns herself with a hair dryer; characters attack each other with magic a few times; a character undergoes a tortuous transformation; animal dissection in a scientific context is a major element of one story, and organs and dead animals are described; creepy scene in which a character feels watched; a character destroys a machine in an extended scene of vandalism (2 pages); a character is swallowed whole (this has an illustration, but it is more humorous than scary).
Sex/Nudity: A few instances of boys or girls having a crush on someone; a boy acts nervous around the girl he likes; a character uses magic to make someone fall in love.
Mature Subject Matter:
Animal abandonment.
Alcohol / Drug Use:
None
