Mischief

by Douglas Clegg

Book Overview

School can be Hell..."A page-turning breakneck-speed horror story!" ★★★★★ A dark fraternity pursues Jim Hook when he enrolls at Harrow Academy, awakening its buried... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0843947667
• ISBN13: 9780843947663
• Release Date: September 2000
• Publisher: Leisure Books
• Length: 359 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 4.2" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

An Author to Look For

I was fortunate enough to read the e-serial novel Nightmare House last summer. Clegg dealt with Harrow's history in that one, which involved the ultimate haunted mansion, where black magic, spirit summoning, and gruesome murders took place. I was so enthralled that I went ahead and ordered the hardback from Cemetery Dance, which is coming out sometime this year. I would recommend that you buy this first, just to get the true nature of Harrow, its founder (Justin Gravesend), who was heavily into the black arts, and its chamber of horrors. It's not necessary, though, because although Harrow is the backdrop of this story it is Jim Hook who is the central figure. Having lost his father and older brother in a car accident, he is determined to live up to their legacy. The pressure becomes too much, and he is caught cheating on a history test. Then comes the Cadaver Society, who are determined to save him from being expelled and make him one of their own. They try to brainwash him into thinking that his father had an illicit affair the night he and his son were killed. The Club puts Jim through a series of mind-numbing initiation tests. The first involves sleeping with a corpse in a mausoleum. After he passes that test, he seeks out the girl whom his dad had had that affair with. The girl tells him the truth about that night (I won't spoil it.) and he goes back to the dorm. The boys snatch him up for the final initiation test, where they take him into the bowels of the Harrow mansion. They stick him in a small chamber with another corpse, that of a boy named Miles, whose ghost has haunted Jim since the beginning of the story. Thus begins a trip into a hell which Jim may never come out of. Does he? Well, you'll have to read the book to find out. What I like most about Douglas Clegg's work is that he doesn't rely too heavily on gore to get his message across. He weaves his plots together with an intriguing twist that always keeps the reader guessing until the final climax of the story. He is definitely an author to watch out for.

A main character you would swear is flesh and blood

Forget the chills, the gripping, sleep-robbing prose and meld with the main character of Mischief. That's what Mr. Clegg does for his readers with this tale -- he pours an apathetic individual into the skin of Jim Hook and offers the reader an opportunity to spend time as another -- and not just any other. Jim Hook walks, he talks, and you'll soon believe he could be found on Any Street, USA. By slipping into Jim, you're immersed in a seemingly real event of love, fear and breathtaking terror. When you re-emerge as yourself, you're heart will be racing just as if you experienced the horror in the flesh. Jim Hook is a character that will live with this reader her entire life. Thank you, Mr. Clegg.

Welcome back to Harrow...

For readers unfamiliar with Douglas Clegg's e-serial novel NIGHTMARE HOUSE, this serves as an excellent introduction to his Harrow Mythos. For readers of the e-serial, this is a fine return to their favorite house of horrors. For Harrow just happens to be a haunted house -- a Hudson Valley monstrosity one could easily imagine as part of some weird subdivision of Hell, nestled between Jackson's Hill House and the Overlook Hotel.This time around, Harrow's heyday as a mansion has long ended. It's now a private boarding school.Enter Jim Hook, a sympathetic & realistically portrayed adolescent. Jim's father and brother both attended Harrow. Jim's about to encounter both the haunting of Harrow and the secret Cadaver Society (sort of a cross between Yale's "Skull and Bones" society and Peter Pan's Lost Boys). What Jim finds within Harrow threatens to tear his world apart.By narrowing down the focus to Jim's personal encounters with Harrow's mysteries, Clegg has created a very successful novel, where the horror is at times claustrophobic. But there are also tantalizing glimpses of the hold Harrow has on others, showing just how deeply the house's roots of evil are sunk into the cursed soil of Watch Point.Foremost a novel about the loss of innocence, this is another wonderful story from Clegg, who continues to amaze me by writing some of the best horror being published today.

Douglas Clegg's Mischief!

Mischief is a great book! I practically devoured this in one sitting because it's a real page turner. Douglas Clegg is now my favorite horror writer, up there with the best. The first book I read of his was You Come When I Call, and it was this shocking saga of terror and now, Mischief. Mischief is more quiet horror that's nearly a coming of age story twisted into a ghost story. It even feels literary without being difficult to read. One of the most interesting aspects was how Clegg manages to create a mounting feeling of dread and horror without any gore to speak of in this one, and how even at the end (I won't spoil it for you), the subtlety of the last pages adds a chill that's also quite moving.Mischief is not for people who want blood in their face, that's for sure. It's atmospheric and fascinating, and as with You Come When I Call, Clegg juggles various storylines within the story that all add up in a kind of literary puzzle to the final conflict of the story. I would suggest people read these books back to back to get a sense of the range here. You Come When I Call is very much in your face horror with shocks on every other page and what feels like a cast of thousands. Mischief is a fast read with a slow build all circling around one character and the small world he touches.As with the end of You Come When I Call, I found Mischief very moving and disturbing but with this kind of redemptive moment, another thing that feels different in horror fiction.I highly recommend Mischief, give it five stars. I will admit that you might have to be a serious reader of fiction to really move through this book. Someone who comes at it wanting gore and gross outs will have to look elsewhere. It captures an aspect to the coming of age story really beautifully and a lot about the school rings true and a lot about what it was like to be a teenager having made a mistake seems right on the mark. Mischief is also a good hybrid of a literary novel with a solid popular fiction of the genre of horror.Other recommendations: Peter Straub's Magic Terror, Bentley Little's The Town, Stephen King's Bag of Bones, Clive Barker's The Great and Secret Show, Christopher Golden's Strange Wood, Dean Koontz's False Memory, Douglas Clegg's You Come When I Call.