Krazyland

Krazyland

In this scary story for fans of Neil Gaiman,  The Last Kids on Earth,  and  Goosebumps , the only way out is krazier than you could ever imagine... Nathan used to be terrified of Krazyland when he was a young kid.    Now that he's 12, the spooky-themed arcade games aren't that bad. He even enjoys stomping on plastic spiders and battling a creepy doll with big plastic eyes. But things become scarier again when kids start to go missing from the entertainment park...   There's another world exists beneath Kraztown's ball pit. A world where the entertainment park's games come to life. And if he isn't careful, Nathan is going to be the next one sucked under!      "Romasco-Moore plunges readers right into the action, folding bits of backstory and exposition in along the way. Each of her short, punchy chapters ends on a cliffhanger, keeping pacing strong and comic suspense high."--Kirkus "Told in Nathan’s amusingly formal first-person voice, short, suspenseful chapters keep the pace moving."--PW Mar Romasco-Moore is the YA author of I Am the Ghost in Your House and Some Kind of Animal, as well as Ghostographs, a collection of short stories paired with vintage photographs. Krazyland is her middle grade debut. She is also an instructor at Columbus College of Art and Design. To learn more follow @MarRomasco on Twitter. Unhappy Birthday There was icing in my nose. Icing in my eyes. Vanilla buttercream, with blue and purple roses. Though the roses were all smashed beyond recognition now. I couldn’t see, but I could hear the cackling of my older cousin Jake, the one who had just shoved me face-first into a cake, and the indignant shrieks of my younger cousin Jenny, whose name had been written on said cake. I would happily have given up all cake for the rest of my life in exchange for instant transportation to anywhere else in the world. I hadn’t even wanted to come to this birthday party. Nothing against Jenny personally, but she was four years younger than me, and so were most of her friends. I was thirteen, much too old to hang out with fourth graders. I pushed myself up and wiped the icing from my eyes. Jake was smirking at me. He was three years older than me and at least a foot and a half taller, and he never let me forget either of those facts. “Now, what’s all this?” My uncle Steven appeared at the door to the party room with a stack of paper plates. Jenny ran over to him, wailing, and tugged on his beige staff T-shirt. “Nathan fell in the cake,” said Jake. Uncle Steven gave him a skeptical look, but there was little hope he would take my side. Jake was his son, after all. “Go cover the front desk for a while” was all he said, waving a hand. My uncle owned this place, and Jake was working here over the summer. No doubt I’d have to work here someday, too. Uncle Steven bought it two years ago, and since then practically every family event has been held in the neon-painted party room. My uncle could at least have owned a normal business. Maybe an ice-cream shop or a movie theater, so I would benefit from unlimited soft serve or free matinees. Instead, he owned Krazyland. Stealthy Vegetables Krazyland Kids Indoor Playplace was, according to a sign in the lobby, “the perfect space for kids to get the exercise they need while having the fun they crave,” which made it sound like one of those fruit juices that have pictures of strawberries on the front but are actually like 75 percent pureed carrots. It was a converted warehouse. Half the building was filled with mechanical games that spat out tickets you could swap for cheap plastic prizes. The other half was filled with a maze of giant plastic tubes that looped around and around like the multicolored guts of a giant. I’d been there a few times before my uncle bought it--for instance, in second grade, when this guy Kyle invited the entire class to his birthday party. I remember he looked vaguely disappointed when I showed up. No doubt it had been his parents’ idea to include everybody, even the kids Kyle didn’t particularly like. Kids like me. The owner back then had been an old guy with a gray beard and weird glasses. I could remember turning in my tickets to him at the prize counter once. “I see great promise in you, young man,” he said as he handed over my beanbag frog. “Do not be discouraged if the world does not fit you.” I blinked at him, too confused to respond, and then scurried off to hide in a corner until Kyle’s birthday party was over. When Uncle Steven did buy the place--I think that old guy had died or something--my parents assumed I’d be delighted. I could get in free now, after all. They thought I’d want to go every day. True, I enjoyed some of the arcade games, though many of them had bad graphics or fiddly controls. A lot of them--like the claw machines, which held the same junk as the bottom shelf of the prize counter--were also just blatant cash grabs. The Skee-Ball lanes and the spider-stomp