Posted on by TracyC

The Zombie Project

Boxcar Children

#128 The Zombie Project by Gertrude Chandler Warner, 2011.

The Alden children are staying in a cabin at Winding River Lodge because their grandfather is friends with Maude Hansen, who owns the lodge. They’re enjoying the fall weather in the woods, and Violet is taking pictures and videos of their trip with their new camera.

There are other people staying at the lodge, too. A newspaper reporter named Madison can’t help but stay on top of the news while she’s there. She tells everyone about a wealthy businessman, Matthew Donovan, who vanished after apparently stealing millions of dollars from his company’s investors. Surprisingly, the charity golf tournament he sponsors is still taking place in his absence. Madison also has a blog about haunted places, and she tells Maude that she’d like to include the Winding River Zombie on her blog. Maud says that the zombie is only a story that her great grandfather made up and that it doesn’t really exist. Benny asks what a zombie is, and his older siblings reluctantly tell him that it’s an undead monster from the movies that eats people. They hope that the idea of the zombie won’t give Benny nightmares.

That evening, when people are telling stories around the campfire, Maude’s teenage grandson, Jake, tells everyone the zombie story. He says that there used to be an old hermit who lived in the woods, and one day, his great grandfather found the old hermit dead. He reported the death to the local sheriff, and they tried to locate the hermit’s family, but they never found out who he really was or where he came from. With no one else to make funeral arrangements, the Hansens arranged for the old hermit to be buried in a nearby cemetery. Then, not long after, a camper had a frightening encounter with a strange man who tried to grab him and bite his arm with bloody teeth! The Hansens found out that someone had dug up the old hermit’s grave and that the body was gone. People believed that the old hermit had turned into a zombie and still lurked in the woods. Jake’s teenage friends love the zombie story, and Jake claims that he’s seen the zombie before.

When Benny thinks he sees a zombie in the woods and lights in the woods at night, the Aldens wonder if the zombie story could be true or if something else is going on. Do the Hansens fake the appearance of the story to keep the legend alive? Could Madison be faking the zombie or getting someone to play zombie so she’ll have a more exciting story for her blog? Or is there something or someone scarier lurking in the woods?

My Reaction

I was a little surprised at the zombie theme of the story because, although The Boxcar Children series has other spooky stories, the lumbering, cannibalistic undead seems more gruesome than this series normally gets. The unusual darkness of the subject shows in Benny’s siblings’ initial reluctance to explain to Benny what zombies are, for fear that he’ll have nightmares. However, the story doesn’t get overly scary, considering the theme. They don’t explain, for example, that zombies in movies typically want to eat human “braaaaiiiiiiinnnnns!” It’s scary enough that they might just generally want to eat people. Maude is also careful to say from the very beginning that there was never any truth to the story. It was always just something her family made up for the benefit of the tourists.

As some readers might guess, the missing businessman has something to do with the appearance of the “zombie”, but that’s not the entire explanation. There are multiple people involved in the so-called zombie sightings, which confuses the issue for the Aldens. I thought the other people involved were obvious because of some of the things the characters said, but younger readers will probably still find the story thrilling. It’s very much a Scooby-Doo style pseudo-ghost story mystery, not too gory or gruesome, but exciting for kids who like things a little spooky.

Posted on by TracyC

Deadline at Spook Cabin

Deadline at Spook Cabin by Eugenia Miller, 1958.

Twelve-year-old Mitch Adams is a newsboy for the summer, but the bicycle that he uses to deliver his newspapers is old and frequently breaks down. He often has to stop and fix it, which means that getting anywhere and delivering his papers takes him longer than it does for the other newsboys. If he doesn’t do something about it soon, his bike might break down completely, and he won’t be able to keep his paper route.

However, the paper he works for is having a contest for the newsboys, and the prize is a new bicycle. If Mitch can win the new bike, his problems will be solved. He’s been saving some money that he could use to get a new bike, but he’s hoping that, if he wins the new bike, he can use the money to buy a special present for his mother – a piano to replace the one they had to sell because they needed money after his father died. It’s an important present because his mother now has a job playing the piano for a dance studio, and she’s been thinking that, if she had a piano of her own again, she could also give piano lessons. In order to win the newspaper contest, Mitch has to be on time with his route, not get any complaints from customers, and sign up more new subscribers this month than any of the other newsboys. Mitch has been working hard at it, and by his count, he’s tied for first place with another boy. If he can keep up the good work to the end of the week, he stands a good chance of winning.

Mitch also has ambitions of becoming a reporter some day. When one of the best reporters for the paper, Jim McCain, says he wants to talk to Mitch about something, Mitch is delighted. Jim invites Mitch to meet him at the newspaper office early the next day so he can show him how the reporters get information from the police and fire department for their stories. Mitch is excited because he’s been asking Jim about that and agrees to meet Jim the next morning.

The next day, Jim actually lets Mitch do some of the calling to the fire department himself after first coaching him about what to say. In particular, he teaches Mitch to base his questions around the “five W’s” – who, what, when, where, and why – that make up a story. Because they live in a small town, there isn’t any particularly startling news from the fire department or the police, but Jim explains that people will want to know what’s happening in the area anyway. Some people may have heard the sounds of a fire engine recently, so they’ll check the newspaper to find out where the fire was, even if it was just a little brush fire.

After Mitch is done with his work for the newspaper, he meets his friend Lyle and Lyle’s younger brother Beanie for a bike ride and a cookout. As they look for a good place to set up a camp fire, they find an abandoned cabin in the woods and decide to take a look inside. There’s not much there, and the boys think that it might be fun to fix it up like it’s their secret hideout and camp there some night. They give the old house the nickname “Spook Cabin” because Beanie thinks it’s kind of creepy. Exploring a little further, they also discover that there’s a tree house in one of the trees surrounding the cabin that’s hard to see from the ground.

Soon, some exciting news comes to Mitch’s paper after all. There was bank robbery in a nearby town. One of the robbers got away, and the police are searching for him. Police officers patrol the town, on the lookout for the fugitive.

Then, a report about a campfire that was left unattended comes from the local fire department. From the description of the campfire, Mitch knows that his friends were the ones who set it because they made it the way they said they would for sending smoke signals. However, they never would have left their fire unattended. Mitch knows that something bad must have happened, and his friends need his help!

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

My Reaction

This is a pretty short chapter book, and I thought it was pretty obvious where the missing bank robber was going to end up, but I really liked the story. The part I liked best was all of the information about how a newspaper works, or rather, how it worked in the mid-20th century. The book would have been educational for its time, and it still is, but many of the processes involved in putting together a newspaper would be done electronically now, using computers. The characters in the story are using manual typewriters, printing presses, and teletype machines. There’s a scene where Mitch asks Jim how the teletype machines work, and Jim explains that they’re “a combination telegraph and typewriter.” The machines in the story would be considered antiques or at least somewhat outdated now, but Jim’s tips for asking the right questions to write a story still apply. When I was a kid, though, my teachers usually said it as the “five W’s and an H” – to write a story or essay, you need to know who, what, when, where, why, and sometimes how something happened.