Midnight Society Offering

All right, everyone!  Settle down and pick a spot.  Comfy?  Great.  Brace yourselves.  We're taking a trip to my childhood with The Tale Of The Campfire Vampires by Clayton Emery, a story within the Are You Afraid Of The Dark? book franchise, which was a spin-off of the t.v. series.  And as such, there is only one proper way to start this. Submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society (and all of us who wished we were part of the Midnight Society), I call this, the review of the Tale Of The Campfire Vampires.

Characters: Doug and Zeke Wester

Premise: Two bickering cousins must work together when one accidentally unleashes monsters.

Our tale begins with kids sitting around a campfire listening to a ghost story (ironically).  One of the kids, Doug Wester, is real gung ho for the camping trip, having been looking forward to and preparing for the camping trip for weeks, while his cousin Zeke, was a certified couch potato and his parents understandably wanted their kiddo to get off his duff and to actually do things.  

Reading this as a kid, I really sympathized with Doug who was forced to take Zeke along to something he had been looking forward to and Zeke's own bad attitude certainly didn't help things and an ill-advised prank hadn't endeared him to his peers, though I can sympathize with him wanting to be liked and accepted as Doug was. However, on my reread, I had a few questions about how exactly Zeke was able to go on this trip.  During a fight with Zeke, Doug states that he had wanted to go on the trip alone and was hoping to be paired up with a random camper, which to me implies that this was a trip that was planned and paid for.  So did the parents have to pay extra for Zeke to be added to the roster and to account for extra supplies and stuff?  Like, how did that work?  Granted, from Doug's dialogue, it also sounded like a kid could just show up with gear and join, which you know, to me sounds dodgy as heck, but hey, what do I know? 🤷

Anyways, during a hike, and arguing with his cousin----as kids do---Zeke finds a rock mound and takes one of the rocks off of the pile which releases the very creatures that one of the counselor had just told them about and they end up attacking the campers, causing Doug and Zeke to be separated from them. The creatures turn out to be wendigos who are noticed by their heart-lights which glow (just as an aside, if the story was about wendigos, why does the title refer to vampires?  Was the original monster supposed to be a vampire and they forgot to change it before submitting it?  Or were they just hoping that no one would notice?  Which, I guess, as a kid, we never did, but I digress.) and soon, Doug and Zeke are running for their lives trying to stay one step ahead of them even as they get caught in a storm.  They end up getting help from firefly-type creatures known as Pukwudgies who lead them to an abandoned Ranger station where they manage to ward off the wendigos long enough for lightning to finally destroy the wendigos, causing their heart-lights to go out.   Don't know how the author came up with that conclusion, but there you have it.

I'm gonna be honest, this was one of my favorite series to watch as a kid but I never really read the spin-off books, though I have a couple of them (the other is The Tale Of The Zero Hero).  That being said, despite some of the problems I mentioned above, I enjoyed this.  I'd read it again and I give this a 6.  With that, I declare this meeting of the Midnight Society closed.

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