Scary Mary – SA Hunter

“Mary’s steps echoed doe the locker-lined hallway. Doors whisked shut as she passed. She caught snippets as the doors closed: Welcome back for a new school year;hope everyone had a nice summer; please turn to page sixty-four. She’d been in one of those classrooms, bored out of her mind and doodling pentagrams onto the cover of her spiral notebook. She wished she still were.”

Mary is better known around school as Scary Mary. She’s a bit of a goth and she likes the way she is. Not bothering anyone until they bother her shes a regular at the guidance councillor for threatening to shrink freshmans head and chucking soft balls at the boys in gym. She is constantly sneered at and bullied at school but itsignored until she retaliates. Then along comes Cy… The new boy at school doesn’t care what people say and sits with Mary in class. They get along great until Mary’s habit of conversing with ghosts gets in the way. With Cy’s house haunted by an unfriendly ghost and Cy not even speaking to her she has to try her best to keep him out of danger.

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I loved the summary of Scary Mary when I saw it on The Slowest’s Bookworms blog. It sounded fun and interesting and Karen’s review made me want it even more. With my new kindle in tow I wandered over to amazon and checked out the sample… then bought the full book, I won’t say I was disappointed as it only cost me 86p, it was good but there were a few things off about it.

I was really impressed with the story, Mary can see ghosts and her friend’s house is haunted by a demon of a ghost. He is evil and scary. I was really freaked out by certain parts of the story which featured the ghost as he really was awful. On top of this Mary’s friend isn’t speaking to her and the school cheerleader is trying to take Mary down so you could say the story is an action packed one. The ghost scenes were fantastic and I got a strong sense of what the atmosphere was like when there were ghosts around. The story really intrigued me and I wanted to know what would happen next the whole way through.

In the short span of the story I grew to really like Mary, her Gran and Rachel. This book was full of strong female characters and even though I hated Vicky, I cant deny that she was strong. I think that given more chance to grow these characters could have been even better and I would have got more of a feel for them but as it stands I only really got to grow attached to Mary. The male characters in the book sucked a bit. They weren’t around very much, there were only two of them and one of them was pretty shocking. I would have liked to have known Cy more as he had so much potential but the pace and length of the book didn’t allow this which was a bit annoying.

It is a short story, at 144 pages (according to Goodreads, my copy didn’t have pages as such!) but it’s filled with a lot of info. I loved that it never stopped with the fast paced action, but at the same time it could get a little confusing.  There were various parts of the book where I was unsure who was saying which line and also where the characters were whilst speaking. The descriptions were lacking and I couldn’t tell you much about what each character looked like other than Gran had wild hair and wore gypsy clothes for her work and Mary had dark hair and wore Doc Martins.

I did enjoy the book and given a little more space, and oomph I think I would have loved it. I think if it had been edited further and the story given more space to grow it would be fantastic. I woul recommend Scary Mary to anyone who likes a good ghost story as it really is a great one but don’t be too upset when it’s over so soon!

Scary Mary is a 2011 self-published book available in ebook format on the Kindle store and you can also read it on the author’s website. There is also a sequel to the story available on the website. 

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