The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack

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By Steve Rasnic Tem

Publisher Description

Fall is Laura's favorite time of year, but this autumn, things are different. She's a teenager now, and the season brings new changes and challenges. Laura's decided she's too old for trick-or-treating and wants a more grown-up Halloween experience with her friends. Unfortunately for Laura, her parents tell her she has to take her little brother, Trevor, out trick-or-treating first. When they go shopping for Halloween costumes, they stumble upon a very strange shop and its even stranger proprietor. When Trevor tries on the wrong mask, the consequences are exciting...and dangerous.

Written by Bram Stoker-, International Horror Guild-, World Fantasy-, British Fantasy Award-winner, Steve Rasnic Tem.

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2 Reviews

4.5

D.K. Hundt

Created almost 6 years ago

“A great gift for middle-grade readers or perhaps consider donating this book to your local library The Mask Shop Of Doctor Blaack: Steve Rasnic Tem Reviewed by D.K. Hundt on Kendall Reviews - November 5, 2018 Steve Rasnic Tem is the author of over four-hundred short stories and seven novels and is a past winner of the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. A collection of his selected stories, Figures Unseen, recently came out from Valancourt Books. His stories for children and young adults have appeared in such anthologies as A Nightmare’s Dozen, edited by Michael Stearns, Bruce Coville’s Book of Spine‐Tinglers 2, and Scary Out There, edited by Jonathan Maberry, and his first middle-grade novel featured in this review The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack, Published and Distributed by Hex Publishers, LLC. Like the thirteen-year-old protagonist in The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack, Laura, my favorite season is Autumn, that time of year when the summer months never seem to end, and then suddenly, a welcome breeze and dancing Fall leaves, the sweet-smelling scent of spiced cider fills the air bringing a smile to my face. Halloween is just around the corner – and like always – I can hardly wait! This year Laura considers herself to be a grown-up and wants nothing more than to spend Halloween with her friends, but, like many older brothers and sisters, her parents told her that she has to take her seven-year-old brother trick-or-treating first “and that’s kid stuff,” especially dressing up in a costume. She secretly wants to go trick-or-treating one last time, just not with her goofy, kid brother Trevor. “Sometimes Laura wants to chop him into little pieces and flush him down the toilet, but her dad said it’s pretty normal for her to think that way,” because she loves him, and having three brothers myself, I agree. Bound and determined to find the perfect Halloween costumes, not the "ill-fitting plastic masks that leave you out of breath and the cheaply made costumes that tear up the back or slit across the belly," Laura and Trevor set off on the city bus where they come upon The Mask Shop Of Doctor Blaack, and I’m convinced – by the stories end – that the mysterious masks they find actually found them. I really like Steve Rasnic Tem’s writing style, though The Mask of Doctor Blaack is a story meant for middle-graders, he doesn’t coddle the reader by toning down the horror or take it to an unnecessary extreme either. At the age of ten I was reading Stephen King novels, so I would have been thrilled if there had been more added to the horror and mayhem within the narrative, which was evenly paced throughout and never felt rushed. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, and the only issue that I had, if you can call it that, is wanting the final scene to play out a bit more. This novel is not only the perfect scary Halloween tale, one that I highly recommend, it also highlights a larger theme of family, love, loss, sacrifice, and the different kinds of masks we all wear in life, like, for example, the smiles we put on our faces to hide the pain we feel so deeply after the loss of a loved one, and in the eyes of Laura and Trevor after the death of one of their nearest and dearest, “it was like saying the moon was gone from the sky," it made little sense at all. ~ D.K. Hundt “Grab your bag and little brother’s hand, drag him across the street as fast as you can! Grin and grin and grin some more, Trick-or-Trick, Trick-or-Treat, Trick or more! Ghosts and goblins and things that go bump, but when little brother starts howling then you’ll jump!” Book Blurb: Fall is Laura’s favorite time of year, but this autumn, things are different. She’s a teenager now, and the season brings new changes and challenges. Laura’s decided she’s too old for trick-or-treating and wants a more grown-up Halloween experience with her friends. Unfortunately for Laura, her parents tell her she has to take her little brother, Trevor, out trick-or-treating first. When they go shopping for Halloween costumes, they stumble upon a very strange shop and its even stranger proprietor. When Trevor tries on the wrong mask, the consequences are exciting…and dangerous. You can buy The Mask Shop Of Doctor Blaack from Amazon UK & Amazon US”

Jim McCoy

Created over 6 years ago

“Our heroine is a girl named Lauren. She's twelve years old and too mature for trick or treating. She could give some of the kids in my neighborhood a lecture here. Maybe she should. Err... well if she existed anyway. At any rate, she's got a problem. Her parents want her to take her little brother Trevor out trick or treating and she's kind of stuck. The first part of the story deals with mainly this issue. It's not until after she accepts it and heads off to the Mask Shop to get costumes for both herself and her brother that things really get started, but once they do... The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack really gets going when Trevor's mask gets stuck to his face. And I don't mean stuck as in "pour some hot water in to dissolve the glue." I mean stuck as in "this thing is magical and isn't coming off until Halloween and then only if you're lucky." The even bigger problem is that Halloween isn't for a couple of days and she has to keep the world from discovering the problem. It's a lot of fun. I won't go too far into Lauren's character arc except to say that it's pretty amazeballs. She does a lot of maturing over the course of a single novel and it makes sense in the context of the story. It builds slowly but it's nice to see. I grew up in an era where a lot of children's books (there was no such thing as a YA genre in the long ago era of the Eighties) dealt with minor problems and the protagonists didn't change much. Tem puts his heroine through a situation that not every adult would be equipped to deal with and she takes it head on. If things don't always go as planned, well, that's life. She finds a way through and that's what's impressive. There is one specific issue that I don't seem to agree with her on, but she makes her own decision and at twelve, that's pretty impressive. Lauren shows more leadership than a lot of the adults I've known too. There are times when she has to take the blame for things she didn't do. There are times when she has to deal with problems she has no way to anticipate. There are times when she has to keep Trevor encouraged. She can't take credit for any of it or the secret of the stuck mask will be out. None of it would be easy, but she does what needs to be done and doesn't complain about it. This is a young lady with chutzpah. Trevor, for his part, is a little trooper too. There are times when I'd expect a child that age (like my daughter) to break down and cry. The fact of the matter is that he does whine a bit but in his case, so would I and I'm a grown man. He gets through things though, even when they're not easy. I like this kid. The thing that makes The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack work so well is that everyone else acts the way you would expect them to if everything was normal. Tem has built his world so well that it's almost seamless with our own. There's just that one tiny little exception about weird masks that stick on faces and do crazy stuff and nobody knows about that. It's close enough to be familiar and just far out enough to be weird. It works perfectly”