Crooked Rock: The Cabin On The Cliff

by RYAN MATTSON

Kids throughout the town of Crooked Rock have gone missing and Lucy decides to look for clues to find out what happened to them.
She is accompanied by her friend Huey, who is scared of everything.
All the clues they find lead them to an old abandoned cabin. Turns out there is more to the cabin than meets the eye.

136 pages, Paperback

Published June 27, 2025

Reviews

[A.D. Aro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, based off the cover, I was expecting something more juvenile, but was pleasantly surprised to find the main characters were in high school. We follow Lucy, who lives in the small, strange town of Crooked Rock, as she investigates a recent rash of child disappearances. The cops don't seem to be doing much about it. There's an abandoned cabin that seems to hold the answer to the mystery.
This was a solid start to the series and I'm looking forward to continuing on with the rest of the Crooked Rock books.

[Alejandro Joseph · Rating 1 out of 5]

Crooked Rock is one of the more consistent modern middle-grade horror series in terms of release, with books coming out left and right unlike Goosebumps’ twice a year (excluding the off comic drop) or other newer series. However, I suspected that these weren’t gonna be, at the very least, heavily edited… and it definitely shows. ‘Course my respect goes out to indie authors as I always say but honesty comes first, and this was pretty bad. There’s some good stuff in here, such as some of the reveals. There’s some disturbing revelations in here that recontextulize a few things, and whilst I have my gripes, I like the bold swing. The ending is good and leaves off with plenty of room for expansion, the characterization is actually surprisingly good albeit starting off rough with some stereotyping, and the mystery is enough to keep you interested. Okay, I’m gonna be blunt now. The writing has a plethora of grammatical errors with some whole words missing from the text, with clearly a lack of thorough editing. If this were a published book by a professional author I’d be dropping this book to a horrid score, but since it’s indie I can’t really complain as much, but it’s definitely the worst aspect of the book, aside from—oh boy—Calvin. I have positives that I mentioned earlier though indirectly but I think he shares one of the most irritating explanations I’ve ever read. The reveal of his connection to the actual plot and what led to a certain decision that gets put into light near the end that he made before the book even began paints him as one of the least intelligent authority figures ever. He essentially overthinks a situation and makes some braindead decisions that make things go from tragic to straight up evil. Backing off his character, I also felt Trevor was a weak character in comparison to the other leads and didn’t serve much a purpose. A villain here (blue handed thing on the cover I assume) is also pretty underwhelming and feels like Spooksville’s Howling Ghost but completely barebones and predictable, not even appearing much though I can’t harp on much there since it didn’t matter. (Also the hair pattern thing discovered early on feels dumb as the law enforcement [minus Calvin, I guess] should’ve connected the dots and told the public, but that didn’t happen). Story is slow with a useless but thankfully almost never relevant cucking situation involving Trevor (deadass), and the stakes never feel fully realized. Let alone the fact that we’re following high schoolers in a middle-grade book feels pretty much irrelevant; it didn’t offer anything new to the table with the increased age of the characters from usual kids’ horror literature. Overall, 3.5/10. It’s pretty bad. Ain’t got no’n’ else to say. Inverse title joke.