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matthewcpeck's review
3.0
Joe Hill's short story is a treat for my fellow NW Vermonters, or NE New Yorkers (the side of the lake is never made explicit). A bittersweet elegy for the expansive worlds of childhood, without the usual gut-wrenching horror you might expect from the writer. 3 1/2 stars.
watercolorstain's review
4.0
Mommy has a killer hangover, and sends her loud and bickering girls out of the house to have some peace and quiet. It's a cold and misty end-of-summer day that will mark Gail's end-of-childhood, and she decides to head down to the lake, where she meets up with a friend... until they realize that the boulder they'd been playing on isn't actually a rock. Their discovery lets them spin out the possibilities their future holds, but also makes them confront mortality... but is it really happening, or are they just playing pretend? We are shown from the very first sentence that Gail has a lively imagination and gets invested in her made-up stories... and yet assuming it's all make-believe leaves a lot of questions unanswered, and this blurry line between reality and fantasy is what makes the story work. A rather unusual one from Hill—it reads like something that could've been written by Gaiman or Bradbury (whose story The Fog Horn must've been a very direct influence).
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This story is also published in Joe Hill's collection Full Throttle. You can read my full review here.
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This story is also published in Joe Hill's collection Full Throttle. You can read my full review here.
charshorrorcorner's review
3.0
I love Joe Hill's work, but I was disappointed with this short story. I can't go too much into why without spoilers. His prose was wonderful as always, and the characters memorable. I just felt I was left...wanting.
midnightbookgirl's review
4.0
More sad than horrific, but Hill definitely inherited the ability to write a damn good short story.
expendablemudge's review
3.0
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Little Gail London and her friend Joel Quarrel are out on a cold and lonely morning at the end of summer, when they make the find of the century: a dead plesiosaur, the size of a two-ton truck, washed up on the sand. With the fog swirling about them, they make their plans, fight to defend their discovery, and face for the first time the enormity of mortality itself… all unaware of what else might be out there in the silver water of Lake Champlain.
My Review: Childhood's end. Abusive and/or neglectful adults versus damaged children. A completely unexpected and seemingly impossible discovery sets each against all, and no one comes out unchanged.
Sound familiar? It should. It's an evergreen plot for a reason. It explores no new territory, mostly because it doesn't need to. This iteration of the evergreen is told in the voice and from the viewpoint of three kids trapped in a world of hungover parents. Their mutual discovery of the dinosaur, apparently dead, causes little Gail to look inside for what she wants to have in this life. What she decides has a poignance that Hill reveals but doesn't linger over. Not for nothing is Hill the son of novelists!
Thirty well-spent minutes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The Publisher Says: Little Gail London and her friend Joel Quarrel are out on a cold and lonely morning at the end of summer, when they make the find of the century: a dead plesiosaur, the size of a two-ton truck, washed up on the sand. With the fog swirling about them, they make their plans, fight to defend their discovery, and face for the first time the enormity of mortality itself… all unaware of what else might be out there in the silver water of Lake Champlain.
My Review: Childhood's end. Abusive and/or neglectful adults versus damaged children. A completely unexpected and seemingly impossible discovery sets each against all, and no one comes out unchanged.
Sound familiar? It should. It's an evergreen plot for a reason. It explores no new territory, mostly because it doesn't need to. This iteration of the evergreen is told in the voice and from the viewpoint of three kids trapped in a world of hungover parents. Their mutual discovery of the dinosaur, apparently dead, causes little Gail to look inside for what she wants to have in this life. What she decides has a poignance that Hill reveals but doesn't linger over. Not for nothing is Hill the son of novelists!
Thirty well-spent minutes.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
pixelina's review
4.0
A Kindle singel that I thought would be horror but rather was a little bittersweet story of childhood imagination.