Skeleton Creek (by Patrick Carman)

Ryan is housebound after he's seriously injured in a fall in an old dredge out in the woods that no one in town wants to talk about.  He's also forbidden to have anything to do with his best friend, Sarah. But both have found and disabled their parents' monitoring software and are communicating by email, as Sarah continues their dangerous investigation and sends Ryan links to the videos she makes documenting her research into the horrific death of a worker on the dredge years ago, what may be his ghost, and the cause of Ryan's accident, and Ryan's father's possible involvement.

The gimmick, if you will, of this book is that it tells only part of the story: the rest is told in a series of online videos, for which readers are given links and passwords at strategic places throughout the story, including the cliffhanger ending. The book is Ryan's journal, and the videos are the ones Sarah makes for Ryan, a mix of Blair Witch Project style frights in the woods and video journals. Together they tell the story, and neither is complete without the other.

Books and movies have had a symbiotic relationship for as long as there have been movies, so it's amazing that no one has done anything quite like this before now. Neither the writing nor the videos is of the highest quality (actually both are very much like something teenagers would make), but together they make a compelling package. Switching back and forth between the two media is fun, and reluctant readers may be enticed by the gimmick, as well as by the slim, easy-to-read text. A successful launch of what is sure to be a vibrant new genre: the book/video hybrid.

Author: Patrick Carman
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Publication date: February 1, 2009
Number of pages: 185
Hardcover price: $14.99
Read Aloud: 10
Read Alone: 10