You’ve Let Them In

You’ve Let Them In is a yarn of great credibility as it has everything that makes a truly scary book really, really, scarily, good! There is of course a hero or in Scott’s case an anti-hero, a garden gnome, a tribe of really terrible fairies that live at the bottom of the garden and the most awful house ever, that right from the first moment Scott and his sister Natalie see it makes them both want to sit down and cry.

Not a good look for a teenage boy and his older sister, but as Leo and Sally are so excited by this new adventure, what can they do but try and well, adjust, if that is at all possible. Scott sulks and carries on for a week or more as teens are wont to do, Natalie gets on with the job of refurbishing her room, and the twins known as R2D2 carry on as if everything were perfectly normal.

Scott discovers a garden gnome at the beginning of what appears to be a dense and scary jungle of a garden at the end of the back yard, and his real fears about the place being haunted come true. Ian or as Sally calls him, Rumpelstiltskin, states that he is the guardian of secrets and the house is indeed subject to attack from the evil fairies at any time. He needs Scott’s help to make sure they never, ever enter the house or garden again, which is a big call for a boy who really is scared of everything to do with the house.

Garden gnomes, hauntings and an overgrown garden will never feel the same after reading You’ve Let Them In as their natural spookiness is the perfect place for a fertile imagination to run riot. Although the storyline is most definitely scary, there is a dry sense of humour running through the story like a thread that holds onto a faint hope that things are not really as bad as they seem: maybe they are not.

Lois Murphy has crafted a really great teen read that is riveting from the first to the last page, but if you are a bit worried about things that go bump and scratch in the night, best read it with the light on!