"Spooksville: The Cold People" by Christopher Pike

I never thought I'd find any children's light horror series that's lamer than Creepover, but here we are. At least Creepover's ghostwriters were actually, y'know, ghostwriters and had some grasp of how to write. Christopher Pike doesn't seem to, and his prose is so bad that I actually DNF'd the book.

Creepover is so bad it's kind of funny how bad it is. Spooksville went out the other end of that and is so bad it's just bad. As you know, Bob, using the "As you know, Bob" technique to introduce backstory or remind readers of events from previous books is generally a terrible idea. There are probably more quibbles I could have had with it had I read past the first chapter or so. 

I picked this up based on the cover blurb, and was not very disappointed. If someone wants to write one that has roughly the same plot but doesn't have Christopher Pike writing, go ahead, and I'll give you an imaginary box of donuts and some fake internet points.

Right before I DNF'd this, the characters decide to melt one of the giant ice cubes with spooky people inside. Never mind that A) they do this by building a fire without any regard for fire safety, B) I haven't managed to do the math for it (the internet is unhelpful) but that's about 56 cubic feet of ice they're melting with a single campfire so it would take eons, and C) there's a spooky person trapped in the ice, and freeing him (by melting the ice) would probably be a bad idea because then he would be free to be all spooky.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: Insufficient data for meaningful answer, since (again) I didn't read past the first chapter because I couldn't handle Christopher Pike's awful writing any longer.

1 star, unless the writing picked up drastically after the first chapter or so.

(Endnote: "The Cold People" is at once a title evocative of the bad prose in this book and a title that, on something better than this, would highlight a fairy-tale-gone-wrong aspect of the story. I mean, maybe it's supposed to do that for this too, but if so, it didn't work.)