He thinks, “At this point, I can let go of the rope and probably break both my legs, or I can stay dangling where I am and be filleted like a small lemon-flavored herring in a Lost-and-Foundery’s cap. They will need to use capital letters, full stops, commas, inverted commas, apostrophes and question marks. Eerie is a wonderfully edgy place, strange, gothic and inhabited by some singular people, and Herbert and Violet’s adventures are equally unique and totally enthralling. But this is also a touching story of friendship and loss, with wonderful vignettes of children on the cusp of growing up. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis.

And while it’s endlessly fascinating to discover what those things are in reality, it’s also interesting to wonder what they might be in a story. After hugging Herbie, Violet “looks a bit embarrassed and tries to hide it by punching [Herbie] on the arm. Being a hundred paces from the beach, all year round, allowed me to discover the strangeness of coastal life for myself. She can also reverse the recordings, making the “little figures of the townsfolk dart around, walking backward at high speed, as if [Herbie and Lady Kraken] are going back in time.Herbie then sees that “the harpoon has buried itself deep between two of the monster’s scales, where — now that we look closely — a slim opening in its armor can be seen. Eerie-on-Sea a strange and mysterious place, which nobody visits in winter when storms rage and monstrous creatures creep. Kids who can handle a scare or two will enjoy the action, adventure, magic, and mystery along the way. Herbie often internally describes the museum owner as having a “Julius Caesar nose” or a “beaky nose.

Eels gets the egg back, but the malamander’s “mouth, lined as before with tooth needles, closes with a sickening crunch over the hand that holds the egg. It’s winter in the town of Eerie-on-Sea, where the mist is thick and the salt spray is rattling the windows of the Grand Nautilus Hotel.Blood is mentioned a few times but not described in detail, the villain punches a child in the face, shoots harpoons at a child and a fantasy creature, and throws a cat into a shelf and knocks it out. The Eerie-on-Sea Mysteries, by award-winning author/ illustrator Thomas Taylor, are creepy middle-grade adventure stories for ages 9+. I was lucky with the name – taking an existing word and changing just one letter to create something new is a powerful technique, but it doesn’t always work.

Malamander is the first in a series of stories about the ‘Legends of Eerie-on-Sea’, in which we meet Herbert Lemon, Lost-and-Founder at the Grand Nautilus Hotel, and his friend Violet Parma, who is lost and wants to be found.Captain K wishes for eternal life, and while he gets what he wished for, he becomes a shell of a man. Even if you delete the flying saucer later, you will have had some fun and probably learnt something important about the characters and their story that will help. When the ice cream kiosks are closed and the bucket-and-spade tourists are gone, darkness and the weather claim the town.