Skeleton Creek

From the beginning, the book just keeps you watching the videos and reading. It's just great! I just read and read. Ryan talks about his thoughts and about Old Joe Bush and the dredge. The dredge is a big machine that filters the gold out of the rocks. When Ryan and his friend Sarah snuck out to see the dredge, Ryan broke his leg. All this happened before the book and he is forbidden to see Sarah. While he is laid up, he starts contacting Sarah and she sends him videos. I CAN'T WAIT TO READ THE NEXT ONE! Son of V.Wright, reviewer

This book was the best book I have ever read! The book was great and the movie were too! I loved it so much that I told alot of people about it, the next day a friend of mine had bought it and started reading it! So many people asked if they could borrow it! I have read this book twice I am thinking of reading it again! I love how it leaves you hanging at the end of the book so I can not wait till the second! I love that it has videos and Old Joe Bush is so scary with his dragging foot! It is so spine chilling! If I were you I would give it a try and read it!

Ryan McCray and Sarah Fincher always felt like something strange was happening in their hometown of Skeleton Creek. Their fears are fully realized one fateful night when they decide to sneak around in the old mining dredge in the woods. Ryan finds something that is so terrifying it sends him over a rail into the darkness below. The next thing he knows he is in a hospital bed with a broken leg and a fuzzy memory about what he saw. Ryan and Sarah's parents decide to separate them as punishment, but the mystery behind the dredge proves to be too much to keep them apart. Since Ryan is housebound, Sarah captures her investigation on film so Ryan can see everything she discovers about the dredge. Likewise, Ryan spends his days researching Skeleton Creek online, finding more questions than answers. Everything they find leads them back to the dredge and the dark secret hidden inside. If they go back they may find the answers, but they may not make it out alive. When I first saw Skeleton Creek on the shelf I thought it was a DVD because of the clever packaging. I then realized it was a book and read the description. A novel that uses online videos to tell the complete story? And a ghost/mystery story at that? My interest was more than piqued and I was all in. Patrick Carman is a storyteller extraordinaire and from the opening lines we are effortlessly sucked into Ryan and Sarah's story. The book element of this story is written in journal form from Ryan's perspective. Carman really nails the first person narrative here and actually makes you feel like you are reading a journal. The design of the book and the handwriting font all work together well to sell the idea. Throughout the story we are presented actual passwords to a website where we get to see the videos Sara shares with Ryan. The video element of the story is a really fun and imaginative way to get us more involved. I was very impressed with the quality of the videos and how effective they were. Even though this is a young adult story, I'm not ashamed to admit I jumped more than once during the creepiest scenes. While this is classified as young adult fiction, I would strongly urge parents to read the book and watch the videos before your children. The story is clean, but some of the subject matter is quite intense and the videos have some really frightening moments. Skelton Creek is the first book in this new series and Patrick Carman leaves things wide open for Book 2. Literary purists might scoff at this new storytelling concept. All I know is how much fun I had with this whole experience. I can't imagine how much work goes into creating a project like this. In the end, the results are what matters and Skeleton Creek works on every level.

Every now and then you come across a book that is so unique, so different, so incredible that you just want to share it with everyone you know. This is one of those books. I read it three times in a week, and still want to go back over it again, in case I missed anything. What makes this book so incredible is that it is actually more than a book; it is a new entertainment experience. It is a book, it is a movie and it is fantastic. The story is told in two parts. It is the story of Ryan and Sarah, who live in Skeleton Creek Oregon. They become fascinated with the town's name, and the fact that it only changed to that recently. While investigating the mystery of the name, they find out about a ghost story of a man named Joe Bush who died in a mining dredge outside of town. While investigating the dredge, something strange happens and Ryan falls and breaks his leg. That is where our story begins. Ryan is in the hospital recovering and he starts to tell the story in his journal so he can make sense of it, and in case something happens to him. But the story is told by both Ryan and Sarah. Currently their parents will not allow them to see each other because they believe that it will encourage their investigative efforts. Yet the two are staying in contact over the web. Ryan is writing the story in his journal, which is our book, and Sarah is creating videos and posting them on her website[...]. Combined they tell the story. It is a great new media/literary adventure. Even the packaging and presentation is new. The book comes in a sleeve like a cover on a new DVD that says: "Read the book ... Watch the videos." Once you slide the book out, it looks like a hard cover journal, and it looks like it was hand-written. The journal has illustrations and, what appears to be items taped inside it. This story is incredibly well done. It is a ghost story for the net generation. You have to read the book and watch the videos and follow groups and websites online to find out more details and background to the story. It is well-written and the videos are amazing. I did read the book the first time to see if it could stand alone without the web component and it does, but the videos take the book to a whole new level of reading entertainment. Some of the websites that you can check out are: [...] The only bad thing I can say about it is that it ends with a cliff-hanger and the conclusion, Ghost in the Machine - Skeleton Creek Book 2, is not due out until September 2009. This book has made my top ten all-time fiction list. It is a ghost story extraordinaire. So as the cover says, read the book and watch the videos - you will be drawn in and amazed by the story! (First published in Imprint 2009-01-09.)

Skeleton Creek is a new kind of book-the text we're used to seeing in books, but also links to a website where you can enter passwords and watch short videos relevant to that part of the book. Here's a bit of a summary: Ryan and Sarah are determined to get to the bottom of the weird happenings in their town of Skeleton Creek (including where that name came from). But after a mysterious accident injures Ryan and leaves him housebound, their parents forbid them from seeing each other and they are forced to communicate (and mystery solve) in private. The storyis told Ryan's journal entries and Sarah's videos. I'll admit that at first I wasn't sure about the idea of combining a traditional book with web videos as part of the storytelling. I know that kids and teens (and boys in particular) are reading less now and using the internet more (and yes I'm aware that I'm using the internet to review books), but the idea of saying, "Hey, read 20 pages of this book and you can watch a video!" gave me a little pause. I was really surprised, though, just how much I did enjoy the format and the book. While it's listed as being for 9-12 year-olds, I think older readers could enjoy it as well (I know I did). I also think the video integration was done really well so that younger readers really can read the book because except for the last video, the journal entry following each video explains enough in Ryan's reaction that if one did miss the video, they could go on with the story. What this means is that parents could go through and watch the videos to see if they had a problem with them for their kids (some of them might startle you or be creepy but nothing's violent or bloody or has bad language), and not allow them to watch those specific ones. I hope I explained that well enough... The book is in all caps (in a handwriting type font so it's not annoying) except for when other papers are pasted in so it's easier for younger readers to read but the writing finds that great balance between being easily understandable...yet not sounding like it's only for ten-year-olds. Basically, I think the writing, the style, and presentation of Skeleton Creek are done so that readers of almost any age can read it (maybe with some parental oversight, but still). (I might be wrong and some of the plot points might be too complicated for younger readers but because nothing goes too in depth, I think it's okay.) I loved that the passwords for the videos were literary-I think that'll encourage kids to possibly check out the respective tales. My one real complaint is that there's a character named Ranger Bonner and knowing as many 12-year-old boys as I do, well, I can see potential trouble with the name. I know some others, however, I might loan this to. Now, to wait for book two... 9/10 for this one [...]