blowtorch@psycho.com

Bone Chillers #18

by Sherry Shahan

While writing a story about a killer named Blowtorch, young Jason finds that his character is coming to life and is trying to break out of Jason's computer. Original.

Genres: Horror

144 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1997

About the author

Sherry Shahan is a photographer and an author. She enjoys watching, photographing, and writing about the otters that play in the sea near her home in California. Sherry also wrote and photographed The Changing Caterpillar for Richard C. Owen Publishers.

Reviews

[Evan Purcell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bonechillers is the wilder, cleverer, less cliffhanger-y cousin to Goosebumps. I've been a huge fan of the series (and TV adaptation) for years, and I thought I knew which books were the best in the series: "Strange Brew" was at the top, with its dark spells and awesome third-act reveal. "Frankenturkey" was probably the most iconic (though its sequel might be more fun). And "Romeo and Ghouliette" (the only real TV-adaptation in the book series) is a personal favorite.

But I finally read "blowtorch@psycho.com" and this one is my new #1 in all categories. It follows a Stephen King-obsessed child author who's too imaginative for his own good and has no interest in girls. (So basically my childhood.) He goes through his own "Word Processor of the Gods" adventure, and it is bugnuts. Reality starts bending around him in ways that are both clever and outrageously weird, and instead of relying on standard horror tropes, these reality bends use burritos and prison imagery, creating instantly iconic visuals throughout.

I loved everything about this story. I loved how the parents worked as trash collectors, but their profession was never shown in a judgmental way. I loved how the female best friend is pulled into the action early on instead of stretching out the paranoia bits too much. I loved how the lovesick other friend is shown to be smart and capable without turning into a full-on love interest. I love the titular boogeyman, who is unlike any other villain in middle grade horror. And I love the title, which is so dumb and so 90s that it might scare people off, but it works perfectly for this story.

10s across the board. Great novel.

[The Gooseblock Bruce · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is easily by a long shot the absolute worst kids horror book I have EVER read. The characters are horrible, the story is unimaginative, the pacing is awful, the entire book gives you an incredible amount of cringe as fart and poop jokes surround this book like flys to a dumpster. Speaking of dumpsters, the best thing to compare this book to, is a dumpster fire.

[Owen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a disappointment. The best part was the beginning, but even then, it was not good enough. The ending was really dumb.
2/5 because the cover is awesome, and the gimmick was cool.

[Brandon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Allright time to read one of the Bone Chillers books with the most fascinating name.That is of course Blowtorch @ psycho.com.I'ma space this title out just Incase it tries to send someone to a link or something haha.This story starts off pretty strong and relatable. Jason loves books and writing he collects Stephen king and has a closet full of books ,and posters of him.Their is this upcoming writing contest at his school ,where whoever writes the best book gets their story published in this short story collection.So Jason is already writing a story called Blowtorch Burns Buns. Okay so that's the worst title you could probably come up with.But we'll see Blowtorch Burns Buns is a story about Blowtorch ,this criminal that is locked away in prison for ending somebody with a hairdryer.So not a blowtorch? Anyway blowtorch has a scab under his eye and hates beans and onions, much like our main protagonist.He says onions looks like maggots and beans give him bad gas. Yeah. After writing a good bit of the story we start seeing things come to life, and I was hoping this would be like The Blob That Ate Everyone .But it was more along the lines of Dr Maniac Vs Robby Schwartz.So yea this was bad.Our streak of good Bone chillers books has ended and that's a shame because I really wanted to like this.Basically what happens in this book is people begin to turn into blowtorch. His parents, his teacher people like that. His house ends up with nothing but beans and onions and swiss cheese to eat.And it's one of Jason's least favorite foods and yes there are a lot of gas jokes, which were bad.They were however some pretty good prison jokes though.The scene where he gets on a bus to go to prison was kinda scary. But it didn't save this book.The negatives outweigh the positives by a long shot. I saw on Goodreads where some one said they lost interest halfway through this book. I lost interest about chapter two or three.Chapter one was the only good thing. Their is no blowtorching. He instead tries to use a hairdryer on our protagonist.That makes zero sense. None of what happens is really explained.It's more of speculation. We don't get how blowtorch came alive.Their is also is no Psycho.com. It's not even mentioned. Jason also is kind of a bad kid. In some of these chapters for instance, their is a girl that is crushing on him and she writes him a note only for him to rip it up in front of her.I am happy to say that this girl does show up near the end and it's actually a little cute. That's really the only other positive thing I have for this book. I'd honestly probably give this book a one out of five stars.

[Jason Harlow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Main character Jason writes a short story about a psycho killer named Blow Torch in order to become a published author, as part of the Edgar Allen Poe High School scary story contest. This was a super fun read and I had trouble deciding between a 3 or 4 star rating, but decided 3/5 makes the most sense. The overall concept was amazing, but this really suffers from getting off to too hot of a start and completely losing control of its pace later on. The food allergy subplot was annoying and predictable from the very beginning. If this were re-done as something other than an entry in a middle-grade series and were a standalone book for adults that kept the same premise, this would pretty much be perfect. However, by the time it concluded it fell pretty flat. I'll check out other Betsy Haynes/Bone Chillers titles but will keep my expectations low.

[Peter Derk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, who could resist with a title like that?

Plus, being published in 1997, I thought for sure this would have some hilarious The Net/Virtuosity kind of stuff going on. It had to, right? Some kind of plot that has something to do with computers Skynetting us and blowing me up while I hold onto a chainlink fence or something?

I remember this kid I was friends with, during that playground bombing part of Terminator 2, was like, “Sarah Connor is so strong, even when she’s just a skeleton she can still hold onto a fence.” And I remember thinking that kid was a fucking idiot. I’m 100% sure he doesn’t remember saying that, but I remember a lot of dumb shit I said as a kid and am still embarrassed about, and I kind of hope he still remembers that one. Because it was dumb, but also because if he remembers that as a low point, he’s probably living a pretty good life.

Anyway, Blowtorch@psycho.com is part of the Bonechillers series and the one I picked because, well, the title and cover are pretty amazing.

This book follows a kid who’s writing a horror story for a story contest at his middle school, and he invents this guy called Blowtorch who is, I don’t know, I guess a murderer, although I think he murdered one person and did it by throwing a hair dryer in the bath tub, so not exactly a ruthless killer (maybe this is about as graphic as you can go in a kids’ horror book?).

Also, it doesn’t appear that “blowtorch” is any kind of regional slang for hair dryer. Which it shouldn’t be. Hair driers are one of the few perfectly-named things in that their name also describes what they do. It’d be like my parents naming me, “Fucks Around On Goodreads.”

Basically, the story world starts encroaching on the real world for seemingly no reason. Possibly this is related to the kid having his 13th birthday, and he was born on a leap year, and this somehow opened a portal to…something? You know how portals are, they just show up.

But there’s no lightning that hits his computer, no toxic waste that splashes on a manuscript, nothing like that, it just sort of happens that the kid’s dad starts to resemble Blowtorch somehow, the cups and plates at the kid’s house are replaced with metal, round-edged dinnerware of the type they have in prison, and basically our world and Blowtorch’s merge.

The book pretty much sucks. I have to be honest, it’s a sucky book.

My favorite part is a quote when taken out of context: “It smelled like garbage. It reminded me of my mom.”

I was like, Jesus Christ, that’s weird and mean but somehow not mean-spirited. But then I remembered that the kid’s mom was a garbagemanwoman, so I was like, “Oh, okay, this kid just doesn’t have a bizarre sense of the world or of smell or of his mother.”

One thing that ends up in these bad knockoffs is a lot of extra stuff, extra detail you don’t need, but you make note of it because you wonder if it’s going to come up later, like when the kid’s dresser in Welcome to the Dead House gets scratched. Is the dresser going to come to life and heal the scratch? Is her dresser going to be replaced by another, monster dresser, and will the absence of the scratch be the clue!?

No, these are just things that happen in the story.

In blowtorch@psycho.com, do I need to know that the kid’s mom is a garbagewoman? No. Do I need to know the specific inscription on the family’s front doormat? No. Do I need to know that a tertiary character, who maybe appears for 2 pages, wears her retainer on a necklace so that when her mom asks if she “wore her retainer,” she can say Yes without lying? Is this something ANYONE did in real life?

Googling…googling…

Okay, weird, I found a video of two ladies takling about this, probably about my age, and one of the ladies asked the other if retainer necklaces were a thing. Apparently they were like a plastic case with a neck strap. The second lady said No, but that they should’ve been because EVERY kid threw their retainer in the cafeteria garbage. Then the lady who had one said “Maybe it’s an Argentina thing,” which, yeah, maybe? Then she said that her parents didn’t want to buy her the official retainer case necklace, and she instead had a DIY version amde with a Play-Doh tub, which sounds SUPER stupid but also like something someone would absolutely wear today.

Anyway, I don’t know, the kid writes a story about this monster man, the monster man comes to life, then the kid tries to rewrite the story and destroy the disk it was stored on, and that doesn’t work, so ultimately what kills the monster man is exposing him to onions and beans and swiss cheese, which they do by throwing beans at him, aerosolizing onions in the garbage dispose-all, and rubbing swiss cheese all over the computer(?) Yeah, for some reason, the cheese part happens to the computer and it’s like…whatever.

So they can’t destroy the story on the computer, they have to use the built-in weakness from the narrative, but also they use it on the computer, but also it doesn’t cause the guy to go into anaphalactic shock, he turns into a big balloon, then is popped by a car antenna, shrinks and deflates like a balloon, then is dead. I guess.

What I’m finding out is that R.L. Stine is pretty good with logic. Most of his books do have some internal logic that seems fairly consistent throughout the book. Whereas what I call these Bumpoffs tend to solve their problems by having the logic of the story be a little too flexible for my liking.

It’s not a satisfying way to tell a story. If you take something simple like Saw, two guys trapped in a room, forced to cut off a foot, how unsatisfying would it be if the end was them being found by the one guy’s wife, who is like, “Oh, shit, let’s get you both out of here!” but the whole time, we didn’t know the wife was looking for them? Or if instead of sawing off a foot, they figured out who Jigsaw was and that made him super mad and he just stood up and shot them? Or, I don’t know, it turns out the one guy has laser vision and can just melt the chain around his foot?

I think you have to have your setup, then adhere to the rules to tell a satisfying story. You can’t have Jason be an unstoppable killing machine and then just make it so that someone can beat him up, you can’t really have Busta Rhymes taze Michael Myers in the testicles and expect people to be pleased with that as an ending.

I mean, or, hot take, you can, because they DID, and why the fuck not? It’s fairly believable that Busta Rhymes circa 2002 could probably stand a fair chance against Michael Myers.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me 4 days to read and it usually only takes me an hour. I kept loosing interest and the plot wasn’t interesting enough to keep me going. And it just wasn’t as good as other bone chillers. It was decent but not good at all. Maybe if I tried to read it all at once it might be better but it felt like a chore to read..

[Rock · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was just so messed up, after finished reading, I was still trying to digest what actyally happened. It was a mess.

The fictional character came to life, creating a havoc on Jason. There were no backstory or reason as to how fictional character could come to life. That's fine, the rest of the plot got worst.

Blowtorch, the villain of the story had superpowers where he could turned human into puppets under his control after eating, wait beans? And he could magically erect a prison in the middle of the city? And had a bus driver fetching him , chasing 3 young kids without any reason why? And out of nowhere he was trying to sell burritos to passerby to turn them into controlled puppets.

The kids had defeated Blowtorch by , wait for it, smearing cheese and cream on computer and throw beans on his face. I had read some bizzare children horror storybook, but nothing was as messed up as this.

I felt my mind was all over the place trying to piece out any logic behind the intention or the rationale of this story. Pacing was bad and felt like it was written without having a clear direction and merely written on the spot when something came to mind.

[E.D. Black · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bone Chillers as a series has some solid bangers in its line-up, but this ain’t one. If you’re a completionist collector and you want to blow fifty bucks on eBay for this pile, fine.