A Book Review - The Train by Diane Hoh (Point Horror)

This was like, the fifth Point Horror book I read this autumn, and after reading another dozen I had to go back and change my 3-star rating to a 4-star, because it stayed with me.

Basic plot: Hannah and friends, along with a bunch of kids from her school, are travelling by train from Chicago to San Francisco. While getting something out of the baggage car, they find a coffin that they realise belongs to Frog, a schoolmate who died recently and who they were all mean to before his death. Hannah - who is already claustrophobic and scared of the train - starts getting attacked by an unknown assailant. Despite the fact that she's locked in the coffin amongst other things, none of her friends seem to take the threats and attacks seriously, even though another friend is stabbed by an ice pick. Hannah is seeing Frog's burned, almost-unrecognisable corpse in various places, and theorises that he's the one playing tricks on her, but nobody believes her.

There's good and bad about this book. The bad, or the hard-to-swallow, is that Hannah's friends don't take her seriously. If I were knocked unconscious and locked in a coffin - I italicise it again, because it's still kind of awesome and terrible to me - I would damn well expect my friends to believe someone is trying to hurt me, and would be furious - like supernova furious - if they wrote it off as a prank. And if a corpse showed up in my bunk, I'd expect them to believe that, not say I was dreaming. I can't figure out if Hannah is a total flake, to have these friends who blithely shrug off her tales of terror, or if her friends - and for that matter, the teachers and detective on the train - are just really dim.

Also, a couple of the things the characters say made me go, WTF? Like, "The train won't leave without us." Uh, what?

The good is that Hannah and her friends are likeable characters, despite their assorted faults, and the book is chilling. I've had it for about twenty years and I still get freaked at some of the scenes. Now that's lasting power. :) The plot, aside from Hannah's friends' disbelief, is well-crafted and the killer's motivation is solid. (After so many books with really shaky reasons behind everything, this is very welcome!) And bonus points for creativity for setting a horror story on a train. Working within those limits couldn't have been easy.

Verdict: Towards the top of my Diane Hoh pile. Better than The Fever and Funhouse, not quite as good as Prom Date.