"The Nest" by Kenneth Oppel

This is rather a creepy book.

Its villain wouldn't be out of place in the Hollow Knight universe, because the villain is bugs. More specifically, supernatural wasps led by a wasp queen who would slot right into the Hollow Knight pantheon.

Basically, our protagonist's baby sibling has birth defects and keeps being about to die. But then some angels visit the protagonist in a dream and tell him that if he agrees to let them help, they can fix the baby. Except they're actually evil supernatural wasps whose method of fixing the baby is to kill it and replace it with a changeling.

There's also a Spookyman who keeps wandering around offering to sharpen people's knives, and a different Spookyman who calls the protagonist's younger sister on her toy phone. |Actually, they're the same Spookyman, who's apparently either one of the wasp changelings or one of the babies the wasps killed. Or possibly someone who had a sibling killed and replaced by the wasps, tried to stop it, and died in the attempt? It's definitely one of those, but I don't know exactly which one|.

The cover of the hardcover book does this cool thing where the words are written on a lower layer than the dustjacket, so they're barely visible normally (at least to me; I got this from the library so it has one of those transparent plastic covers) but if you push the dustjacket back down onto them you can see the words properly. I thought that was cool.

The titular "Nest" refers to the wasp nest that the evil supernatural wasps are growing the replacement baby in.

Kenneth Oppel writes a lot of very unique stuff. So far I've reviewed a steampunkish airship book, a graphic novel about bats, and now... whatever this is. And I know he's also written at least a book about Frankenstein (the doctor, not the monster), not to mention all the other stuff I assume he's written that I don't know about.

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: T for some body horror and entirely too many wasps.

3 stars. 

(Endnote: Everything I come up with for this endnote seems like it would go better in the main body of the review.)