31. Black Harvest – Ann Cheetham

This is totally a cruel summer for Colin and Prill (sister and brother) and cousin Oliver (not of the Brady Bunch variety) and Colin and Prill’s sister Alison and their mom and their dog. It seems their holiday house is cursed. Milk goes bad near instantly. So does any food that enters the house. Colin at one point wakes up surrounded by mold and they can all smell mold and other terrible smells a lot of the time. The dog’s food also seems to suddenly have maggots after looking fine when they opened the can.

There are also dead people in the yard at the holiday house, and ghosts, and Oliver finds the dead after deciding to dig a den, so he says, but he’s got some weird sense about this place and needs to dig that pit and mess with archaeology. But, he’s kind of the only person who might get to the bottom of things before they all starve on their Irish holiday, even if Colin and Prill are really only tolerating him instead of appreciating his different sensibilities.

Horace was a pig who appreciated all the other pigs he met. He would have been a better vacation friend for Oliver, but perhaps not the vacation in this book.

Horace also has a nice little vacation home with an ominous squirrel.
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