In a Crooked Little House

 In a Crooked Little House... lives a crooked little man. If that one line doesn't make you want to read this book, I don't know what could. This little 230 page novel was brilliant in its own way. It wasn't eye opening, it didn't teach me a life lesson, but it was such an amazing novel with plot twists that were honestly unpredictable. The writing is crisp and intelligent, the word choices are perfect. For a little five dollar horror novel, this book is surprisingly in depth. The author, A G Cascone, went really deep into character development, so much so that I felt as if I was the character at certain points. His characters were so unique, although they did fit into the archetypes. At first it was hard to determine who the main character was, as it is narrated by an omnipresence, but it became apparent that Cassie and Iggy Boy were the most important. They both have their own 'quest': Cassie's to survive life in school without being terrorized for being on an academic scholarship, Iggy Boy's to either marry, or brutally murder Cassie, whichever was necessary to make her his and only his. The heroes in this story aren't actually the main characters, there is Jake the maintenance man, who seems to be missing something important in his head and who also seems to have inappropriate feelings for Cassie, and Slater, the quiet photographer who ends up being the courageous boyfriend, although he was originally suspected to be Iggy Boy. The only shadow in this book is actually Iggy Boy, which of course is a self assigned nickname for the new house master, the handsome, young, totally lovable Mr Gilliard's second personality. Iggy Boy is in all honesty a psycho killer, photographing his next victim until he figures out a suitable death to 'punish them for their crimes'. After he has killed them in the appropriate fashion, he takes many compromising photos of them, which he takes to his little room above the dorms, develops, and then hangs all over his walls. The herald in this story, which does not occur until nearly the end of the book when everything really starts going down, is when Iggy Boy kidnaps Cassie from the school dance and locks her up in a gym. The official 'call to adventure' is when Jake makes Slater leave the dance, after he had been searching for her in there, and takes him down to the gym. The shapeshifter is Mr Gilliard who starts as the friend, the only person Cassie talks to after Trevor nearly rapes her, but then he turns into Iggy Boy, brutally murdering people, strangling them with the vacuum cord then hanging them from the rafters, pushing them down the stairs and snapping their necks. There aren't any obvious tricksters in this book, maybe Slater since he is occasionally funny, but not really. The only Allies are the two heroes along with Cassie. So basically, this novel fit into all of the traditional archetypes, but then it completely broke from the norm, throwing crazy plot twists and awesome descriptive scenes, making it totally awesome.