Happy Town
Stay calm and remain HAPPY. Help is on the way.
Perfect for fans of Gordon Korman and Jennifer L. Holm, this adventure-packed middle grade story, set in a world not too far from our own, follows a family that moves to a remote company town that seems perfect on the surface….
Keegan knows there’s something off about Happy Town.
The isolated, high-tech company town is too perfect—with a dome keeping out bad weather and self-driving vehicles rumbling throughout the town delivering residents to work and school. Still, Keegan is excited to grow his art skills at Happy Town’s ultra-modern middle school, even if he has less time to see his mom and stepdad because of their new jobs.
But when the two become obsessed with working and eating Happy Corp Meat Cramwich (the Microwaveable Sandwich Crammed with Meat) and Keegan gets sentenced to Mandatory Work Opportunities for refusing to follow Happy Town’s shady rules, he discovers a dangerous glitch in the system that’s turning the town’s happy residents into zombies. Carnivorous, meat-craving, literal zombies. With his new friends Gloriana and Tank by his side, he’ll need to find a way to destroy Happy Town’s happy system—before there’s nothing left.
Kirkus Reviws says:
Consumerism turns terrifying in a creepy company town.
Newly transplanted Keegan has just settled into his new home in the seemingly utopian and cloyingly named Happy Town with his mom and his stepdad, Carl. Enclosed beneath a climate-controlled dome and devoid of birds or bugs, Happy Town life is dictated by corporate magnate Arlo Corn, who brands everything with jargon (buses are known as “conveyors,” and detention is called Mandatory Saturday Work Opportunity). All adults in Happy Town receive tiny cranial implants known colloquially as “imps,” giving Corn an all-access pass into their subconscious (kids are thankfully spared this invasion of privacy). Commercials constantly stream as imp-embedded grown-ups fritter from one corporately decreed trend to the next—musical instruments one day and hats the next—all deducted from any pay they earn. Keegan and new friends Gloriana (who has an appetite for destruction) and Tank (a romance novel devotee) know that things aren’t quite right in Happy Town, but when the adults all develop an insatiable craving for meat, things take a dark turn. Van Eekhout’s satirical romp is a wonderfully silly and gross page-turner, sure to resonate with Goosebumps fans. Populated with cryogenic heads, meat-crazed zombies, and adorable animal toys that provide electric shocks, this tale will delight genre fans with its skillfully wrought intersection of social commentary and horror. Physical descriptions are minimal.
By turns thrilling and thought-provoking. (Horror. 8-12)
