Today we’re spotlighting MONSTER MOVIE! by Chuck Wendig!
Read on for more about the author and the book!
About the Author: Chuck Wendig
Chuck Wendig is the author of the New York Times bestseller Dust & Grim, as well as numerous bestselling novels for adults and young adults. He invites you to find him online at terribleminds.com.
About the Book: MONSTER MOVIE!
In this hair-raising and hilarious novel by New York Times bestselling author Chuck Wendig, a boy must face his many fears to save his town from a cursed videotape—before “The Scariest Movie Ever Made” devours his friends and family.
Ethan Pitowski is afraid of everything. Luckily, his best friends don’t mind, and when their entire class gets invited to watch a long-buried horror movie at the most popular boy in school’s house, Ethan’s friends encourage him to join in the fun. But when the “scariest movie ever made” reveals itself to be not just a movie about a monster, but a movie that is a monster, only a terrified Ethan escapes its clutches. Now he must find a way to stop the monster and save his friends (and also, um, get their heads back).
With his signature balance of kid-friendly horror and humor, Chuck Wendig crafts a spookily heartfelt novel about anxiety, friendship, and finding your unique voice and inner strength.
~Excerpt~
ONE
MISTER CHITTERS MAKES A CALL
“So there it is,” Harley Wurth said, pointing out the window of his bedroom, past the overhanging roof, toward a big- trunked pine tree. It was Sunday, and he had texted both Ethan and Olivia an hour ago:
HUMONGOUS ELEPHANT FORSYTHIA
They knew what their secret code meant, so they headed right over, and now they were looking out the window with him.
Harley had a big goofy smile on his face. (Because he always did. Olivia said he was definitely the reincarnated spirit of a golden retriever. That felt true to Ethan.)
Ethan—that is to say, Ethan Pitowski, who lived a mile away, on the other end of Main Street—squinted into the sun. “I don’t see it.” He let his gaze drift past the tree, down to the narrow, bumpy sidewalk. The houses on this side of town were older: Victorians that gave way to ranch-style homes. On Ethan’s side of town, the sidewalks were straighter and wider, and the houses were of a style his mother called “craftsman.” She often said that the Victorians and the craftsmans didn’t really get along—some stylistic battle of old versus new, tired versus modern, both in terms of money and how long they’d lived there. Don’t even get her started on the ranch-style homes, either. Ethan didn’t understand any of it. Adults were weird. “Sorry, Harley. Are you sure it’s in the tree?”
“Oh, it’s there,” Harley said, using both hands to hook bits of his raggedy blond mullet around his oversize ears. “I swear.”
“Yeah, I don’t see it either,” Olivia James said. Harley was tall, but Olivia was even taller—she, a Black girl with big purple glasses and Invisalign braces, was all legs and all arms and a puff of hair that only extended her height.
Ethan had an idea. “Maybe send it a text?”
“On it,” Olivia said. She pulled out her phone and said, “Open the window so we can hear.”
Harley shrugged, then opened it, grunting. He seemed to take a moment to enjoy the late spring breeze blowing in, making a little mm sound. Ethan almost expected his tongue to loll out of his mouth like a dog with its head out the car window.
Olivia used her phone to text Harley’s.
Sure enough, out there in the pine tree—
Ding- doo- ding
At that, Ethan finally saw the phone tucked in the crook of two branches. The screen glowed for a minute and then dimmed again.
Olivia saw it too.
“Can’t you just climb back out there and get it?” she asked Harley. “I mean, you put it there.”
Harley shrugged again. “Oh yeah, no, I didn’t put it out there.”
Blink, blink. Ethan felt crazy for asking, but he had to.
“So . . . how, exactly, did it get into the tree?”
“Oh! Haha, yeah. Mister Chitters took it.”
Olivia and Ethan shared a what exactly is Harley talking about now kind of look. This was a regular occurrence. Because, well. Harley was Harley.
“Mister Chitters,” Olivia said, repeating the words in a low tone. Incredulous. Dubious. Most uncertain.
“Haha, yeah, he’s my squirrel friend.”
Another look. Another round of blink blink blink. “You have a squirrel friend?” Ethan asked, twitching a little. A tiny anxiety bubble appeared in his mind, threatening to swell and then go pop.
“Totally.” Harley itched the armpit of his shirt, which displayed art for a band called Demongallop. It showed a horse with demon horns riding a spiky electric guitar. Ethan didn’t like it. “We hang out sometimes.”
“I don’t think he’s much of a friend if he stole your phone,” Olivia said.
“He just got confused because of the peanut butter.”
Conversations with Harley were sometimes like riding a roller coaster designed by a five- year- old who’s gone goofy on energy drinks. In the middle of a hurricane.
Olivia was done being polite. “Harley, just spit it out!”
“Oh, okay. Yeah, so sometimes I sit here by the window and watch Mister Chitters, and then sometimes I open the window and we, like, hang out and stuff, and I tell Mister Chitters my problems and Mister Chitters chitters his problems at me and it’s real cool, and then one time I was like, Aw, man, I bet you’re hungry, Mister C, and so I went downstairs and got some peanut butter and put it on my phone like a little plate, and I served it to him and he seemed to really, really like it, like, a lot, but then when he was done? He took the plate.”
“The plate . . . being your phone.”
“That’s right.”
“And why didn’t you use, like, a spoon?”
“Because I knew my mom wouldn’t want me using one of our spoons,” he said, as if that made all the sense in the world.
Ethan could not contain his squick at this point. He kept it calm at first: “Harley, you shouldn’t be that close to a wild animal. They have diseases. Did you know that marmots carry the Plague? You know? The Black Death.”
Uh‑oh. He found himself speaking faster and faster, a burbling babble of ahhhhhhhHHHHH. But it was impossible to slow down.
“Don’t even get me started on rabies. So who knows what kind of diseases squirrels have. And now that thing has touched your phone, and—and—” His brain raced, and he was imagining that Harley was the vector for some weird squirrel-human hybrid disease, and that they were all sucking in tainted squirrel breath, and he felt his breathing quicken and his pulse race and—
It was Harley and Olivia’s turn to share a look. They had a patented Ethan look just like Ethan and Olivia had a Harley one.
“Dude,” Olivia said. “You’re spiraling.”
“A little,” Ethan said, almost gasping.
“C’mere,” she said, beckoning him closer. Then she did the thing where she got up alongside him and pushed her shoulder against his—like she was a tree he could lean on. And he did. “You’re good,” she said.
“It’s cool, man. Mister Chitters doesn’t have diseases, probably,” Harley blurted out. “He’s just nuts for peanuts— hahaha! Get it? Because nuts? Though I don’t think peanuts are nuts. They’re legumes. Shoot. And I don’t think there are any good legume jokes.” Jokes were his way of offering reassurance. While Ethan was sure everything was going to go utterly wrong all the time, Harley was the opposite: certain that things would work out, no worries, it’ll be fine to jump into this quarry, or to eat those weird berries, or to ramp a skateboard over that beehive. “Anyway! I just want my phone back.”
Ethan tried to calm his panic attack. He had techniques. Being with his friends helped. Olivia’s voice and presence were good for this sort of thing. She steadied him.
“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Okay.”
“Awesome,” Harley said. “So I was thinking, like, I’d just take a running jump off the roof and grab the phone, and you guys could hang out at the bottom of the tree and catch me after.”
“Ennnh,” Olivia said, again dubious. “Ethan, you wanna take this?”
Ethan shook his head, anxiety ramping right back up. “No! No. No. Harley, that is not a plan, that is a guaranteed admission to the hospital. You can’t just jump into a tree! You’ll break things! An arm! A leg! The very crucial neck!”
“I dunno,” Harley said, pronouncing it eye- unno. “I’m nimble.”
(Spoiler warning: He was not nimble.)
“Nah,” Olivia said. “You’re not. Ethan’s right, Har. Bad idea. We will not be able to catch you. But I got a better idea.” To Ethan she said, “You got your notebook?” He nodded. It was as reliable as rain that Ethan had his notebook on him.
“Start to draw this—”
Except, interruption. Suddenly the door opened and Harley’s dad came in. He was like an inflated, swollenversion of Harley. Taller, wider, not muscly so much as marshmallowy. He, too, had a mullet: His was a wellwashed chestnut color. He wore a tie- dye sleeveless T‑shirt and cargo shorts, despite it being spring and still a little chilly out.
“’Sup, kids, whatcha doing?” Mr. Wurth asked.
“Just trying to rescue my phone out of the tree because a squirrel took it,” Harley said.
“Oh, gnarly,” the dad said, with no further questions. “Have fun.”
“Wait,” Olivia called out. “Mr. Wurth, do you have, like, a bungee cord?”
“Sure. I use a bunch in my trailer.” Harley’s dad always had junk around— buying it, selling it, transporting it. “I’ll grab a few.”
At that, Olivia began instructing Ethan on how to draw her plan—basically, they were going to create a swing out of bungee cords and, from the corner of the roof, swing Harley over to the tree. Ethan furiously sketched this out—e was pretty proud of how much
Harley looked like Harley, even though he was a little kawaii cartoon version. (His big mullety bucket head in particular was pretty perfect, Ethan decided.) He felt himself calming down, returning to normal, enjoying the peace that drawing brought him.
“Aw, man, looks cool,” came a voice over Ethan’s shoulder, and he nearly peed his pants. It was just Mr. Wurth, though, having come back in with the bungee cords. “Looks like fun, too.”
It was unsurprising that Mr. Wurth was just as excited about this plan as Harley—Harley’s father was famous for once getting his meaty hand stuck in a pickle jar. He got it out by doing a karate punch against the countertop. (He had to get seven stitches, a fact he
thought was “pretty rad, huh?”) That was just one of his many misadventures. The phrase like father, like son hadn’t made much sense to Ethan before he met the Wurth family, but now he had to wonder.
So if Harley was on board with Olivia’s plan, and Harley’s father was on board, that meant this was very clearly a bad idea. Ethan felt himself poised to spiral again.
“Okay. No. Okay. We’re not— we’re not doing this.” He started scribbling hasty doodles of the potential dangers. “Harley could fall, break a leg.” There, a snapped stick figure leg emitting little lightning- bolt pain lines. “He could impale himself on a branch.” Stick Figure Harley now had a tree branch emerging from his stick figure heart. “He could get the bungee cord wrapped around his ankle and smack into the side of the house, and then he’d just be dangling and . . . and . . . I don’t know, a deer could attack him!” Stick Figure Harley dangled on the page, speared by the many- pointed antlers of Stick Figure Deer.
Harley said, with utter seriousness, “It would be an honor to be attacked by a deer. They’re so majestic.”
“Ethan, I think the plan is good—” Olivia started to say, but Ethan interrupted with another objection.
“Not to mention the sap.” This he didn’t even bother to draw. “Pine trees are gooey with sap, and that stuff does not come off with regular soap. What if Harley gets stuck to the tree and can never ever get unstuck—”
“Ethan—”
“Wait.”
Hold up.
Sap.
Sticky.
He did a quick scan of Harley’s room, which was of course a mess— a chaos bomb of clothes in piles and a half- assembled drum kit and LEGO bricks left around like caltrops. But there on the wall, next to a Demongallop poster, was a kid’s bow- and- arrow set.
“That’s it,” he said.
Everyone leaned in, as if to silently ask, What’s it?
Ethan grinned and began to draw.
Title: MONSTER MOVIE!
Author: Chuck Wendig
Release Date: 9/24/24
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Genre: Middle grade fiction, horror
Age Range: 8-12
