Why You'll Love This
Murderous Christmas elves, a moving statue, and a dachshund named Boswell — Connolly somehow makes cosmic doom feel like a cozy nightmare.
- Great if you want: darkly comic middle-grade horror with genuine wit and warmth
- The experience: breezy but gleefully unsettling — reads fast, lingers strangely
- The writing: Connolly layers deadpan footnotes and absurdist asides into the narrative
- Skip if: you haven't read books one and two — context matters here
About This Book
Something wicked has moved into Biddlecombe, and it has excellent taste in real estate. Samuel Johnson is already dealing with the usual complications of adolescence — romantic confusion, a stubborn dachshund, and demons who won't take a hint — when the grandest toy shop the town has ever seen prepares to throw open its doors. It should be a celebration. It isn't. Between a statue that refuses to stay put, shadows consuming the night sky, and Christmas elves with genuinely murderous intentions, it becomes clear that someone — or something — has been engineering events toward a very specific, very catastrophic end.
What Connolly does so well across this series, and here especially, is hold dark and delightful in perfect tension. The footnotes alone are worth the price of admission — witty, digressive, occasionally philosophical, and always unexpected. The prose has the confidence of a writer who trusts his readers to keep up, blending cosmic horror with genuine warmth and comedy that earns its laughs rather than begging for them. It's a book that takes its absurdities seriously, which turns out to be exactly the right approach.
