Book Review: The Tanglewood Terror

Title: The Tanglewood Terror

Author: Kurtis Scaletta

Publisher: Knopf

Date: 2011

ISBN: 978-0-375-96758-0

Length: 264 pages

Quote: “I read that they’ve documented less than a quarter of the world’s fungi…There might be one extraordinary species of fungus that’s capable of things we never imagined.”

In this story a strictly out-of-school group of kids—not age- or gender-matched—discover a mutant species of honey fungus that they associate with the mystery of what caused an earlier town, built near their own town, to vanish without a trace. Tough and even mobile, unlike real honey fungus, the mutant mushrooms devour wooden objects with impossible speed, forming a bare dead clearing in the woods and moving aggressively into wood-frame buildings. Some of the older townsfolk still put their faith in fungicide sprays but, though Eric’s too nice a kid to condemn his father’s efforts to spray the fungi out of their house, he knows spray poisons never work very well for very long. Can he rally his friends, who happen to include a neighbor’s pet pig, to dig up the core of the fungus and kill it? Even if this impossible fungus, instead of putting out thin threads, puts out ropy tentacles that can whip around people’s waists? Or is there a simpler, more natural, more effective remedy than that?

There’s a lot to like about Eric and his friends. Though Eric is a big fat linebacker with a remarkable lack of interest in pop culture past or present (references are always sailing past his empty head), he’s learning that his strength is not for hurting people in this book. At first we see him acting rough and careless toward Brian (his little brother) and Randy (the best runner on his team), but any tendencies he might have toward being a bully are pulled up short when he accidentally breaks Randy’s leg. (They were just quarrelling and playing keep-away on the manure heap behind the pig’s sty, when Randy slipped…) His crash course in sensitivity progresses almost as fast as the mythical mushrooms. Eric learns something about Brian’s reactions to his playful rough “teasing,” stops pushing other kids around, and starts talking like the coach he’s probably destined to become. He’s good at it; with the credibility he’s gained from a solid performance on the field, when he invites the team to help dig up the fungus he finds himself recruiting even high school kids to join his friends from grade seven, and allergy-prone Allan, from grade six, and Brian, Mandy, and the pig.

The pig, inspired by the nonfiction story of The Good Good Pig, gets a meaty part of the action; she “mothers” a favorite bucket, finds the core of the fungus, and just happens, in one of those lovely coincidences one finds in fiction, to stray away from the kids at just the right point on the trail for Eric to stumble into an old stone “cabin” in the woods...Well, it’s supposed to be fiction. If your disbelief slips down from its suspension, at least you can laugh.

Can a seventh grade boy, not even a quarterback but a linebacker, with no interest in either reading or writing, write a book as long and (on the whole) as clever as this one? That’s another point where your disbelief might slip. Eric never even cares enough to look up the books, or for that matter the songs or movies, to which his father and his friends refer in conversation. At least half a dozen times he mentions not knowing something the reader, even if still in grade five, is supposed to recognize (and the adult reader can laugh and reminisce about). That he misses references to “I Love Lucy” and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E.Frankweiler seems plausible, but when he doesn’t recognize the Second Commandment…he’s not mentioned his parents being anti-religious. But when he learns that Mandy’s gone back to Minnesota and he’s unlikely to have a chance to tell her how everything turned out, and she orders him to write, he sits down and writes 264 pages of laugh-out-loud adventures, with some excellent insights into being a big brother and a future football coach…? ???

There’s only ever meant to be one of Gordon Korman in a century and if I remember correctly even he didn’t finish This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall in grade seven. But I think it’s important for middle school readers, to whom The Tanglewood Terror is marketed, to understand something they’ve not lived out yet. I don’t believe The Tanglewood Terror is what a kid like Eric sits down and writes to a friend who’s not able to finish an adventure with the rest of the kids who’ve shared it. No way. Nobody writes 264 pages of coherent narrative, with logical sequence and just-right descriptions and correct spelling and mostly correct grammar (it should be “fewer than a quarter,” in the first sentence quoted above, but that’s okay because it’s quoted from a conversation), in grade seven. By the time Eric had polished the story up to this degree, he would've been in grade nine or ten. But yes, big guys can write. Even linebackers can write. It's only been in Generation X that most of the English-speaking world stopped expecting guys to write better than girls.