Fly by Night

Spinetinglers #11

by M.T. Coffin

Meet the crows who refuse to die...Ty wishes he'd never gone out to the graveyard. He just wanted to help find a friend's lost dog. But old Mrs. Crow, the caretaker, says the dog woke the Crow ancestors and now they're angry and very, very hungry. 'They feed on fear, ' Mrs. Crow says. 'The more you fear them, the stronger they get.' Now the Crow family is getting ready for a feast, and a terrified Ty is running for his life.

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Alejandro Joseph · Rating 2 out of 5]

My monthly Spinetinglers read continues this July with… ugh. That cover… dude, just make it a normal crow and it’d be an all-time high for Jacobus. The stupid granny head is, well, stupid. But as for the contents of the book… ugh again? The book has a lot of faults but some positives that keep it well afloat, getting to those now. The writing is exquisite alike to Mrs. Crow’s manor, and the characters are quite good as well. The mystery within the first eighty pages is enough to keep one intrigued and it’s extremely hard to predict where this book is going, even with the blurb (I’ll get to that in a minute). The ending was pretty good, and I found some of the scares to be genuinely decent, like the one on page seventy-eight. The plot itself is solid on paper, but when stretched out to one hundred-twelve pieces of paper, it uh… well, it’s kind of boring. I’m a decent reader; I can read these books at an okay pace, some in merely a night. However, this is the first book in a while (since, like, Trick or Trap) to test my patience. I made it through swiftly but damn does nothing really happen for most of the book. It’s like we’re just waiting for reveals to come along naturally, and that’s fine for some books and stories, but here, it didn’t work. The villains are unclear and leave a lot to be desired, let alone they don’t actually reveal themselves until way later in the story and we barely even get time to care, since they’re defeated in a few pages. Mrs. Crow felt like a red herring of a red herring; her motives are extremely unclear and whilst she’s framed a certain way by the end of the book, it felt like the author didn’t know what to do with her and made her character a bit of a mess. The pace is too slow for its own good and even though stuff eventually does happen, it’s not enough to warrant this book’s page count—let a-fucking-lone, THE BLURB REVEALS THE WHOLE BOOK. I’m not even kidding, the blurb displays all the vital plot details. I’m glad I didn’t read it before I went in, because damn would’ve I been more pissed. There’s some instances of the characters being utter retards: Ty ignores all the bad signs and keeps returning to the dirt road by the Crow Manor (slight spoiler ig), Ty’s mother doesn’t care that her kids went into a STRANGER’S HOME and goes into the house with them the next day, even though she knows that Mrs. Crow is weird and might even be a bit psycho. Ty’s Mom: please judge books by their covers more, dumbass. Also, Ty’s sister is way too charismatic and sweet and whilst it plays into the plot, it does paint her as a bit blind. The characters are likable, yes, but they do have their momentary faults. The climax is abrupt and underwhelming, the tone is absent entirely, and Mrs. Crow can apparently teleport. With all that said, I don’t hate the book; it’s certainly better than “Where Have All the Parents Gone?” But, nonetheless, it feels more like a rough draft of a better story. Overall, 5/10. I don’t hate it. I don’t like it. I simply want this book to soar high and fly, by night at the latest (HE SAID THE THING OFHEIABSJSJSBDJWJSN).

[Austin Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oof. One of the most boring, uneventful, and anticlimactic Spinetinglers books I've read. Decent writing and characterization saves it from being a complete wash.

[Colton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a strange Spinetinglers book, in that there's very little scares or cliffhangers. I think the author was trying to go for some slow creepiness, but aside from one scene a kid wakes up to tapping outside, opens his window, and sees five strangers on his front porch nothing much happens.

The main character just walks around the woods in his new neighborhood, sometimes running into flocks of crows and this old woman. Then the book just ends with no resolution. It turns out the crows are the ghosts of this old woman's family members, who feed on fear. How to beat them? Just be polite to them. The end. We don't see him confront them or anything. Laaaame. This one is easily skippable.