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THE MAD COOK OF PYMATUNING
by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Berkley, February 2007
320 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0425214222


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Teenager Jerry Muller is going to be a counselor in the summer camp he has gone to for years, but this time he has his nine-year-old half-brother Peter along with him. Jerry is hoping that, if he shows his half-brother a good time, his father will permit him to move in with the new family. Jerry is having problems with his mother, who is an alcoholic, and he no longer wants to live with her.

Happy and proud of his camp, Camp Seneca, Jerry hopes that it will teach Peter all about Indian history and ways and will show the younger boy a good time, as it has been doing for years past. But for some reason this year, 1952, Jerry keeps getting the feeling that something is 'off' with the camp and the adults who run it.

The owner, Woody Wentworth, has always had a vision about his camp. He wanted it to help build the boys' characters by making their experience in the outdoors something more than just a fun summer. Jerry has always admired how Woody's scary stories and tension-filled quests work to make the boys more sure of themselves, but right away this year, Jerry feels that something has gone wrong. At the top of the list of wrong things is that Woody's wife Winnie, a warm, loving woman, isn't there from the first day.

There's also a new man on staff who is in charge of the Indian program. He is a master of disguises named Buck Silverstone who insists on being called Redclaw. His use of Indian rituals and the Indian ways have an angry and harsh edge to it. When Redclaw starts to lecture the boys, Jerry feels as if some sort of violent occurrence will happen.

Jerry keeps hoping that things have not changed at the camp, but little by little the old stand-bys like the scary story around the campfire not only become more brutal, but everything about the camp also becomes dangerous, as the boys start to actually get hurt.

By the end of the book, the story becomes an all-out homage to every violent B grade movie about dangerous summer camps. But the strangest thing of all is that the book is told as a narrative from the future – Jerry as an adult is telling us the story. By the writer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt letting the readers know that Jerry survived to be an adult, the fear that Jerry doesn't live is trashed and undercut. That drains away a lot of the tension and it left me confused up to the last sentence of the book.

THE MAD COOK OF PYMATUNING started out well enough as a story of a boy growing up and leaving childhood behind. But after a while the book turned into a story for people who love violence and gore and not much else. I forced myself to read it and was just disappointed with it by the end. In fact, I had to reread the last paragraphs because it felt as if the book ended abruptly and I didn't understand what happened. I'm still not certain what happened, but it says a lot about the book that I don't care enough to waste time to figure out what the author was trying to say.

Reviewed by A. L. Katz, August 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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