Heck: Where the bad kids go by Dale Basye - review

This book tempted me for months. Sitting on the New Books rack with its glowing colors and intricate Bob Dob cover illustration of two cool kids. And finally I succumbed, took it home, began reading it, a chapter at a time, to my kids at bedtime.

As the dark, twisted details and plot points added up - shoplifting and vandalism, an exploding marshmallow bear, thrift-store black dresses - I kept waiting for the story to gel. But beyond the premise: when bad kids die, they go to a junior-league Hell called Heck, which premise you can pretty much get from the title... there really isn't that much story. Which is not in and of itself a bad thing. This is one of those world-building books in which the characters wander around discovering each aspect of their world. The food. The organizational structure. The economy. And here's what happens when you read a book like that - either you enjoy the imagination of the writer, and you love the details and characters that he or she lovingly describes, or you do not care for the writer's vision, and you do not enjoy the book.

A Series of Unfortunate Events falls this way. Readers either like names such as Carmelita Spats and details such as Esme Squalor's hideous fashion sense (me) or they don't (some people). So maybe it's just me with Heck. But I think I can be objective in saying that the book falls rather flat. I find the tone unvarying, the word choice a bit unimaginative, and the pace slow. In addition, many of the jokes will zip right over the heads of the child reader, starting with the surname of the main characters - they are Marlo and Milton Fauster. Not Foster, Faust-er. Get it? As in the fifteenth-century German alchemist, later the subject of a play by Goethe?

You get forgiven a couple of those, in my opinion, but this book is kind of loaded with 'em. And I believe that dark and twisted works even better when the main characters respect each other. All dark and no light makes a YA graphic novel, not middle grade fiction.

I'd recommend Debi Gliori's Pure Dead Magic books and the Secrets of Dripping Fang to kids attracted by Heck's creepy-cool allure.