Ruin Road
by Lamar Giles
Middle School, High School    Scholastic    368 pp.
9/24    9781338894134    $19.99
Paper ed.  9781546146971    $12.99
e-book ed.  9781338894141    $12.99

Kincade Webster, a Black star wide receiver for the mostly white Neeson Preparatory Academy in Virginia, has ambitions of attending The Ohio State University and going on to the NFL. He puts up with racism at his school (and online) and tries to keep his head in the game. But when he takes the bus home one day, a white woman accuses him of grabbing her, and fellow passengers take her side, causing Cade to make a quick exit. Ducking into a pawn shop (where, unbeknownst to Cade, otherworldly forces are at work), he says to the shopkeeper, “I wish everyone would stop acting so scared around me.” This wish sends Cade on an unwanted and terrifying journey on the Ruin Road between life and death and an association with his neighborhood’s evil slumlord Arvin Skinner, who long ago made a bargain with the Night Merchant: years would be added to Skinner’s life in return for Skinner’s causing pain and suffering to others (including murder). Skinner’s influence is now everywhere in Cade’s life, endangering him, his friends, his neighborhood, and Neeson Prep. Giles’s horror thriller is expertly crafted and indeed truly horrifying, weaving many threads into this tapestry of evil: Cade’s father’s lung cancer; violence by the local gang; bomb threats called in to his school; issues of racism, wealth and privilege, and family. Pair this with Giles’s The Getaway (rev. 11/22) for a double-header of evil and mayhem.

From the ">November/December 2024 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.