Yzabel / January 26, 2015

Billy Lovecraft Saves the World by Billy Lovecraft

My rating: [rating=2]

Summary:

The last thing Billy Lovecraft’s parents sent him before the crash was a photo of something on the wing of their plane.

Now he’s stuck with a horrible and heart-breaking mystery: What was that awful creature, and why were his parents targeted?

It’s up to Billy to gather a team of like-minded kids and lead them through a dark new reality where the monsters are real, not everyone is who they seem to be, and an ancient alien wants to devour the world.

Review:

(I got a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.)

It’s kind of difficult forme to rate this book higher, though I hoped (and wanted) to. In general, it was a light, fun read, and I did enjoy it. The style was a bit too juvenile to my liking, but for a middle-grade audience, this would be quite all right. And, anyway, Lovecraftian mythos for the win. Especially if you have played the Call of Cthulhu pen and paper RPG, you just can’t help remember those sanity rolls, those poor Investigators ending up mad, dead, digested into some eldritch ceature’s stomach, not necessarily in that order, mind you. There’s something deeply enjoyable in such a setting for me. Also, eldritch cuteness factor as far as Cthulittle was concerned: talk about a weird combination.

This novel has an inherent flaw, though, in that its protagonists and tone seem at odds with its potential target audience. The characters were between 10 and 12, basically either at the end of elementary school or at the very beginning of middle school (depending on one’s perception of the schooling system in their own country, that is). Their actions and reactions are often those of kids, yet at times they display features that I’d expect to crop up in older teenagers, not in pre-teens.

The other problem is the very mythos the story is based on. I remember discovering and reading Lovecraft’s works when I was 15-17, not before (and I used to read horror stories before that). I’m really not sure a 12-year-old reader would be familiar with all the references, and unfortunately, once you remove those, the story remains nice, but… nothing extraordinary either.

I think it would be more interesting, and reach a wider audience, if the tone had been more YA and the protagonists a wee bit older. (But maybe that’s just me.)