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Strange Matter #9
Deadly Delivery
How could things get worse? First the frantic call from Mom saying that she and Dad would be late getting home, and that the clueless sitter would be over soon to watch us. Then the worst storm in Fairfield history pounds our house, knocking out our power, lights, and phone. And now a hideous man is lurking at our door and won't go away! He is frantically peering in the windows and ringing the doorbell over and over. . .
It's a special, late night delivery for Simon and Sarah White. A deadly delivery. A package of disaster that sends them screaming through the wildest, scariest, most dangerous night of their lives. . .
in their very own house.
At least, it was their house. Then they opened the box, flipped the latches and peeked under the lid. Now it's loose and planning on a little. . . redecorating.
And once it's out, getting it back in is murder.
It's a special, late night delivery for Simon and Sarah White. A deadly delivery. A package of disaster that sends them screaming through the wildest, scariest, most dangerous night of their lives. . .
in their very own house.
At least, it was their house. Then they opened the box, flipped the latches and peeked under the lid. Now it's loose and planning on a little. . . redecorating.
And once it's out, getting it back in is murder.
- GenresYoung Adult
Audio CD
First published October 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 7, 2026
Let’s just jump right in. Strange Matter haunted house story, right? Not quite… this volume has a drastic switch up a little over forty pages in from the haunting you’d expect from the cover and blurb to a much stranger matter (HA) that coincidentally bleeds into the next book in the series a bit. And I think that’s wonderful; the story is super fun and it’s full steam ahead, beginning-to-end, without the usual “is the house haunted?” question in favor of “how tf we closing Pandora’s box here?” It’s great fun, and the plot delivers… deadly so (HAHA). There’s some good horror quickies with a plethora of ghosts around the middle of the book, and the ending… kinda gotta love it for the dumb FedEx joke, let alone it giving you plenty to chew on and feeling like a random but neat one-note addition to the lore of this series. Plus there was karma—cool. The only reason I have this at three stars is because, well, I think the progression is ballocks, the exposition is brief and bare bones (even more so than Fly the Unfriendly Skies), and the story past a point feels underdeveloped. Expanding on the first issue: this book is random as fuck, with the first third being blatant chaos, the middle being random encounters with spirits that don’t serve a purpose (so I guess we can add padding), and the actual story here kicks in at the final portion. And getting to that… there is not much to dissect there, and it’s pretty no-frills. Not to mention the villain is a PeaDough File but that embarrassingly makes sense, historically speaking + it’s basically a Beetlejuice rehash there. Oh, and the book has almost zero breathing room. Overall, 7/10. Super fun, wack story progression though. Diddly Delivery (context needed).
February 27, 2026
It’s finally time for a ripoff round. First of the year. I’m late but I got tied up in other stuff, so whoops. But hey I’m here and of course my beloved Strange Matter came up first. This is a recent-ish one to be added to Archive and I had been curious based on the premise. Let’s see how it is.
Simon and Sara are typical siblings and one night, their parents are out boning I guess. It’s here where they get a strange delivery and it’s a trunk. They open it to reveal that a ghost was trapped inside it. It causes all sorts of mayhem until it uses its magic to turn their house into a castle.
It turns out that this is the ghost of a baron from centuries ago who was a rather bad man. He led to a lot of death, basically. He tried to forcefully marry someone and now they gotta try to stop him from pulling that sort of thing again.
This one is solid although it is another that may place in the middle. We’ve seen Simon and Sara before in some other books with this as their main starring roll. Simon is the narrator. They establish their personalities very quickly and there’s a solid sibling bond. They work well together but do give each other grief. Realistic, charming, I like it.
This book gets off the ground quickly and doesn’t waste too much time. Sort of, it takes a bit for the castle thing to happen so it is odd he waited that long. The standout element here is the odd tone. Early on it leans fairly comedic. There’s quips galore and the ghost is pretty much the Tasmanian devil in terms of just being a chaos gremlin.
Simon even draws cartoons which we do see at one point and it’s wild. But then it takes a turn into being one of the darkest entries due to what this baron has done. And how he ends up wanting to marry Sarah. That fight, a 2nd kids horror child bride story has hit the tower, two nickels.
It’s mostly stuff we hear about in the past, so really the marriage idea is the darkest thing that actually happens. Although we get plenty of gross imagery with the baron and we have skeletons of people he killed hung up. See if it’s skeletons then it’s totally not a corpse.
Yet even in this latter half, it keeps the quips and comedic moments causing a weird tone. And this series nature of having text be bold, italics or in CAPSs a lot is really egregious here. It is toned down enough by the climax and they handle these tones well enough but I do wish the dialogue were stronger in places.
Pace is solid though and Baron is one of the best villains we’ve seen in there. Plus for a Marty Engle one, it’s fairly simple and well explained. We don’t qutie know why this was sent to them but it’s not a big deal.
It’s a pretty good one in terms of having fun and providing a crazy and darker idea. It feels similar to Terror Tower in terms of the setting. The tonal issues is what holds it back from being a favorite but it has some notable elements. Overall, a bit mixed but a fun one that was pretty easy to plow through, it just went by so quickly.
Perhaps be weary of the tone but otherwise, it’s another solid Strange Matter book. Also we get the bully Kyle here, so that’s fun. Solid twist too.
That does it for this one. Next time we have a visit to Graveyard School as we tackle the other sports book it has. See ya then.
Simon and Sara are typical siblings and one night, their parents are out boning I guess. It’s here where they get a strange delivery and it’s a trunk. They open it to reveal that a ghost was trapped inside it. It causes all sorts of mayhem until it uses its magic to turn their house into a castle.
It turns out that this is the ghost of a baron from centuries ago who was a rather bad man. He led to a lot of death, basically. He tried to forcefully marry someone and now they gotta try to stop him from pulling that sort of thing again.
This one is solid although it is another that may place in the middle. We’ve seen Simon and Sara before in some other books with this as their main starring roll. Simon is the narrator. They establish their personalities very quickly and there’s a solid sibling bond. They work well together but do give each other grief. Realistic, charming, I like it.
This book gets off the ground quickly and doesn’t waste too much time. Sort of, it takes a bit for the castle thing to happen so it is odd he waited that long. The standout element here is the odd tone. Early on it leans fairly comedic. There’s quips galore and the ghost is pretty much the Tasmanian devil in terms of just being a chaos gremlin.
Simon even draws cartoons which we do see at one point and it’s wild. But then it takes a turn into being one of the darkest entries due to what this baron has done. And how he ends up wanting to marry Sarah. That fight, a 2nd kids horror child bride story has hit the tower, two nickels.
It’s mostly stuff we hear about in the past, so really the marriage idea is the darkest thing that actually happens. Although we get plenty of gross imagery with the baron and we have skeletons of people he killed hung up. See if it’s skeletons then it’s totally not a corpse.
Yet even in this latter half, it keeps the quips and comedic moments causing a weird tone. And this series nature of having text be bold, italics or in CAPSs a lot is really egregious here. It is toned down enough by the climax and they handle these tones well enough but I do wish the dialogue were stronger in places.
Pace is solid though and Baron is one of the best villains we’ve seen in there. Plus for a Marty Engle one, it’s fairly simple and well explained. We don’t qutie know why this was sent to them but it’s not a big deal.
It’s a pretty good one in terms of having fun and providing a crazy and darker idea. It feels similar to Terror Tower in terms of the setting. The tonal issues is what holds it back from being a favorite but it has some notable elements. Overall, a bit mixed but a fun one that was pretty easy to plow through, it just went by so quickly.
Perhaps be weary of the tone but otherwise, it’s another solid Strange Matter book. Also we get the bully Kyle here, so that’s fun. Solid twist too.
That does it for this one. Next time we have a visit to Graveyard School as we tackle the other sports book it has. See ya then.
February 7, 2016
I really can't recommend this book for children. The "Strange Matter" series is a great YA series as a whole and fairly tame in its content, but this is one of the darkest books in the set and I'm really not sure how this is supposed to be a kids' book. The plot centers around a medieval Baron whose crimes of torturing, killing, mutilating and burying alive his victims are all vividly described. When we learn what his final goal is towards the end, it gets even more disturbing. Again, I was a big fan of Engle and Barnes as a kid but I don't know quite what they were thinking on this one, it's too dark for a YA novel.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews