The Night Gardener

Scary stories are difficult to write for a child audience. If your concept is too scary, it will no longer be a story for children. If your concept isn't scary enough, it will be GOOSEBUMPS, wildly popular, but more cheesy than scary. There is a fine line between too scary and GOOSEBUMPS.

Jonathan Auxier's THE NIGHT GARDENER rests right on that line.

THE NIGHT GARDENER is not for the faint of heart. It will undoubtedly give children (and some adults) nightmares. That being said, this is the best, most complex work of fiction I have read this year.

I can tend to be long winded, so I will keep my summary of this story short. Molly and Kip are the main characters of this story. They are orphans, working in a dilapidated Victorian mansion, for a creepy family, The Windsors. From the onset, Molly and Kip feel as if they should leave this place, but they have nowhere else to go. Then, scary stuff happens.

The visuals in this novel are incredible.

"But strangest of all was the tree.

The tree was enormous and looked very, very old. Most trees cast an air of quiet dignity over their surroundings. This one did not. Most trees invite you to climb up into their canopy. This one did not. Most trees make you want to carve your initials into the trunk. This one did not. To stand in the shadow of this tree was to feel a chill run through your whole body.

The tree was so close to the house that they almost seemed to have grown together--its gnarled trunk running up the wall like a great black chimney stack. Palsied branches crept out in all directions like a second roof--including a few that appeared to cut straight through the walls. 'It's almost a part of the house,' Kip said softly.

Why any person would build a home so close to such a terrible tree was beyond him."

Often times, whether or not a story ends up GOOSEBUMP material, depends on the handling of the bogeyman. All scary stories have a bogeyman, and the bogeyman makes or breaks the story. Kids either run and hide and have nightmares of the bogeyman, or they laugh at him because he's covered in slime. Take the movie Signs for instance, directed by M. Night Shyamalan. This taut, alien invasion story is all kinds of creepy until the final 10 minutes of the film. The fear and tension build off screen for the entire movie, then all of the sudden, this gangly, awkward, dumb-looking alien is standing in the family's living room and Joaquin Phoenix is beating it with a baseball bat. Movie, ruined.

THE NIGHT GARDENER does NOT suffer from this. That's all I'm going to say.

All aspects of this story are top notch. The description of the Victorian-era setting is fantastic. Each character is given their own arc making the character development highly distinguished. The twists and turns of the plot are dizzying, yet impressive. Just when you think one seed of a mystery has been planted, it sprouts, ripens, and is plucked from its vine within just a few pages. The plot moves along briskly, balancing so many questions and subplots brilliantly, never giving the reader more than they can handle and always giving the reader just enough answers to entice them along.

I could have finished this book in just a few sittings (it was that enthralling), but I found myself slowing down and savoring the story and the language. You will not find more descriptive sentence level writing and prose than Auxier's work in THE NIGHT GARDENER. As demented as it sounds, I didn't want it to end.

Word of warning though: You will want to read this one during the day time. Or with the lights on. Every light on.

And away from trees. Definitely away from any trees.