The Midnight Game

Strange Matter #2

by Marty M. Engle, Johnny Ray Barnes

Tyler Webb has been invited to attend a very special game.

Someone has left him a ticket for a final showdown between two old football teams from Fairfield's past. The only problem is, the game is scheduled for midnight, and there's no way Tyler's parents will let him go.

Curiosity gets the best of him, and Tyler sneaks out to see the game. Now he's sitting in the bleachers under the moonlight, waiting for the arrival of both sides.

But the players are not running onto the field.

They're crawling.

Straight up from the ground.

And they know they're being watched.

Genres: Paranormal

2 pages, Audio CD

First published November 1, 1995

Reviews

[Alejandro Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

I mean, what do I say? Strange Matter is the best fucking middle-grade horror series I’ve ever read, and it’s barely even close. Unsurprisingly, this entry was fantastic, even though I had my doubts (I’m not into sports, so I was fearing some dulled enjoyment). This series is the most consistently entertaining and well-crafted shit I’ve read from this genre, so I can’t even act shocked anymore. Alright, enough general glaze: let’s glaze in more specific ways. The plot of this book is super engaging and there’s some great revelations throughout that disallows for a dull moment. There’s great concepts/ideas thrown in (original or not), like the hand stuff and how the ‘midnight game’ worked, and what it was all about. The main character is really good, generally ALL of the characters are pretty alright for what we get of them, and I really liked the skeletal imagery here; animated skeletons are my favorite entity type in these books, and there were plenty here. The book is tense as well as entertaining, the pacing is on-point, the fate of the main antagonist is gross af, and the stakes are decently high (in a unique-ish way). Legitimately, I could go on all day… but you get the point. I do wanna say, though, that I felt the book was a bit meandering in the first half (but not much at all), and that I was a bit taken out by the sports stuff. I’m not into sports, especially Football, so I wasn’t exactly eating all of that up, but thankfully everything else made that stuff more fun that it would’ve been had it just been like Horror at Camp JellyJam, where it was blatant sports scenes with mere spooky interpretations. No, the sports ARE the spooks here—mostly. Overall—oh, come on? You know it’s a damn 10/10. Strgoat Mgoatter. Peak Matter. Rilo Buru, please marry me and adopt a Dero. This series is peaking and whilst this isn’t my favorite it’s still top one-hundred kids-horror books OAT as of now.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was way better than it had any right to be. If you're expecting something absurd after gazing upon the lovely CGI rendered book cover with the snarling cartoon skeletons (and I'm describing the best cover for this book; I don't even know what's going on with the eBook release), you'll instead be pleasantly surprised by a story of ephemeral time travel, a town under a vengeful curse caused by a bad football game during The Great Depression, a kid unearthing his grandfather's mysterious past, and the undead playing for their right to finally rest.

That isn't to say that there isn't any corniness in this book and that they're treating this subject matter completely seriously, since at one point this same kid bursts through a zombie's chest in order to make a field goal and a zombie apocalypse is used as a threat by an undead football player. But they definitely gave this some gravitas that I was not expecting.

Let me put it this way - I hated sports so much as a high schooler that I took four years of marching band just so I'd never have to take a single semester of P. E. and even I got invested.

The main thing holding this book back is that, since it's written for a grade school audience, the page length is at a very brisk 118 pages and the reading level is, you know, for kids. I almost want to see someone like Stephen King tackle this story outline - maybe focus more on the story of the town and how it was shaped by the decisions made in this one football game - and turn it into the horrifying novella that it's destined to be.

[Lacy Phillips · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this book was okay but not the best ever. It was just okay and I read the first book “Strange Matter” last year because I discovered it while in my school library and thought it looked interesting so I checked it out. Let me tell you the first book is way way better than the second that is for sure. I asked my mom for the second one for Christmas and she got me the third one too so yeah it”s just okay.

[Lacy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this book was okay but not the best ever. It was just okay and I read the first book "Strange Matter' last year because I discovered it while in my school library and thought it looked interesting so I checked it out. Let me tell you the first book is way way better than the second that is for sure. I asked my mom for the second one for Christmas and she got me the third one too so yeah it's just okay. Defiantly would not recommend it at all.

[Cws]

JEAR3-Bar