#patrick carman

[anneofteenfables]

The Black Circle ♔

39 Clues

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read The Dark Hills Divide by Patrick Carman (2005)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onJun 17, 2024

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Skeleton Creek | Author: Patrick Carman | Publisher: Scholastic (2009)

[book--brackets]

Round 1, Poll 12: Dark Hills Divide vs Clementine

Vote!

Dark Hills Divide by Patrick Carman

Clementine by Sara Pennypacker

Voting ended onSep 17, 2023

[solidandsound]

How Patrick Carman’s SKELETON CREEK Tapped into My Gay Teen Paranoia

Skeleton Creek is a 2009 middle-grade horror novel by Patrick Carman. Presented in a journal format, it follows Ryan, a teenaged writer who is stuck at home with an injured leg after taking a fall while exploring an abandoned mining dredge with his best friend, Sarah. The twosome are always getting into trouble together, and the accident is the last straw for Ryan’s parents: if Ryan ever contacts Sarah again, they are willing to sell their house and move to keep the two of them apart.

But these friends have a mystery to solve, so they continue to communicate in secret. Ryan deletes every email he gets from Sarah immediately after reading them, and keeps a close watch on his journal where he takes notes on their investigation. But could Ryan’s parents be reading his journal while he sleeps, or seeing Sarah’s emails before he can get to them? When they insist he spends some time out of his room, is it for his recovery, or so they can go through his things? And is Sarah all they care about, or do they just not want Ryan to discover the truth? He becomes paranoid, never sure his parents aren’t reading everything he’s writing. His privacy is constantly in question. As the book goes on, he trusts his parents less and less.

I think I started keeping my first journal in first grade. I wrote that I planned to marry my female best friend. Shortly after writing this deep dark secret, my grandmother joked about it to me. She didn’t even try to hide the fact that she’d read my journal. I stopped writing in it immediately. If my private thoughts weren’t going to stay private, what was the point?

I didn’t attempt to keep a journal again until I was 14. I had known I was gay for a few years and was deeply, painfully in love with a straight boy. I needed somewhere to vent these feelings that felt like they were killing me. I was also much better at keeping secrets, or thought I was, at least. After all, no one knew I was gay, did they? So my journal, like my explicitly queer fiction and all the stuff I shouldn’t have been looking at online, was only one more small part of my big secret.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t anxious about being found out. It seems melodramatic now, but I knew about gay bashings, I knew about kids being kicked out of their homes, and part of me was sure that if anyone knew I was gay, those things would happen to me. Meanwhile, my loved ones continued to violate my privacy. I would come home from school to find obvious signs that my mother had been in my room. She was brazen, unapologetic. She would throw out precious items she saw as junk. During one memorable fight, I screamed at her, saying, “I don’t trust you anymore!” I stayed in my room as much as I could; it was the only way I knew to protect myself. Any wrong moves, any slip-ups, and they would know. My world would come crashing down around me.

Skeleton Creek is not a queer book by any means. It has no confirmed queer characters (although Henry from New York sure does give me vibes™). Even so, what Ryan goes through resonates deeply with my queer experience. When he tries to remember whether or not he deleted his browser history, when he waits until his parents are asleep to watch a video, when he looks at his journal wondering if it’s been moved, I am pulled back into my 14-year-old self. At one point, he invokes Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart to describe his paranoia: “I can imagine my dad quietly entering my room in the dark. He’s moving so slowly it takes him an hour to get to my bed—just like the madman in that story. I hear something and sit up, but it’s pitch-black and I’m afraid to turn on the light, so I don’t see him standing there. I sit upright for a long time and I know someone is in the room even though I can’t see them. I’m terrified.”

Maybe this experience is more universal than I know. Maybe every teen keeps things from their parents. But I don’t think the stakes are as high for most teens as they felt for me and Ryan. When I lay awake in the dark, listening to my parents talk in the hall, trying to figure out if they were talking about me, I wasn’t afraid of getting grounded. It was a Tell-Tale Heart kind of fear. I was a closeted gay teen, and I was always terrified.

. . .

Thanks for reading. If you liked this, you can find more of my work at https://www.patreon.com/davisgsee

[angelofempire]

I need to reread the dark hills divide by patrick carman. underrated children’s fantasy series. 

[same-stars]

The wall was old and falling down in places, overrun with weeds and thistle, crawling with green ivy. I had a key, which had been kept with the deed, and the key unlocked the high, arching metal door, rusted at the hinges. 

We walked through the gate and my heart sank deeper still.

It had the appearance of a place that was to be, but never became, a place that had a special purpose, often thought of but never acted on. 

There were no buildings, not one. Not a house or a red barn or a garage where a rich man might tinker with a foreign sports car he never intended to finish. But there were signs everywhere, expensive on. made of marble, like tombstones now, tipped over and dotting the acreage. 

This is what the first one we came to said: Here I will build a country house. where my wife and boy will play. And I will play with them, too When my work is through. 

Farther still, another sign, the corner cracked and broken: This is where the greenhouse will go, where my wife will grow rare orchids. And I will grow them, too. When my work is through.  

And more: 

The barn will go here, with horses my son will ride. And I will ride one, too. When my work is through. 

The pond will go here, with ducks for Merganzer, because he loves ducks. And I love them, too. I'll love them best when my work is through.

And finally, we came to the saddest marble sign of all, the one that echoed my father's words down through the years. The largest plot remained. 

And here I will make my field, a place with tools and sheds and tables of every kind, a field where we will imagine the wildest things in the summer sun, my boy and me. In the field of wacky inventions, my boy will prosper. And I will, too. When my work is through.

I stood in that open field, watching the wind blow through the tall weeds, and my good friend, George, put an arm around me. We cried for what never was and what could never be. 

“His heart was in the right place after all,” George said. 

It was just the sort of thing a best friend should say. 

—Patrick Carman, Floors. 

[backlogbooks]

May Wrap Up Post

Hello! This was a Really Good Reading Month because my semester ended halfway through, leaving me with a lot more time for reading. 

Books for the tbrbusterchallenge: 

False Testimony by Rose Connors ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This Dame for Hire by Sandra Scoppettone ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Prey by Michael Crichton ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Rereads: 

Skeleton Creek by Patrick Carman ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ghost in the Machine by Patrick Carman ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Crossbones by Patrick Carman ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Raven by Patrick Carman ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Other Books: 

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Revealed by Margaret Peterson Haddix ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Redeemed by Margaret Peterson Haddix ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I’ve been working on a lot of series this month, which is new for me! I’m usually not good at finishing series--hence why it’s taken me over a decade to finish the missing series lol--but I’ve been really enjoying my read of A Series of Unfortunate Events (and expect to finish it this summer, assuming the audiobooks stay available in my library app). And I loved the end of the Skeleton Creek series even more this reread—really glad these books hold up