Review: The Thief of Always

This was a short and strange, but fun book I read on the plane to Australia. It's by horror author Clive Barker, although this is targeted towards children (or at least its main characters are children and nothing too horrific happens). It's the story of a young boy named Harvey Swick who is growing bored of his life of no excitement. One day he is visited by a strange smiling creature called Rictus who offers to take him away to an exciting and wondrous place. Harvey decides to go, but says he'll only remain a few hours. When he gets to Mr. Hood's Holiday House, however, he finds it so wondrous that he cannot leave. There is tons of delicious food, and all of the seasons of the year happen in a single day. He can go trick or treating in the most beautiful constumes, and he gets whatever he desires for Christmas.

But as time goes on Harvey begins to notice some odd things about the house. He can't seem to figure out how to get back to the outside world, and Lulu, a child who's been at the house much longer than Harvey, is beginning to act odd. A Halloween prank on another child, Wendell, that goes wrong makes Harvey realize there's something sinister about the operation, and that he needs to get away. But escaping may not be enough: Harvey needs to defeat the myaterious Mr. Hood himself.

I was a little leery of this book at first. Something about the "all of the holidays in one day" concept seemed unoriginal and uninteresting. But it grew on me: the monsters and setting are so creepy and weird and the situations Harvey gets into so unexpected that I found myself liking it. It's an efficient little horror novel for children: delivering scares and suspense whilst not also being gratuitously violent or gory. The characters were interesting, with pretty much every character initially seeming to be fairly simple but revealing complexity as the story went on. I also liked that when Harvey describes what happened to his parents, they don't dismiss him out of hand, but actually try to believe him. All in all, a good fun read