Scorpion Falls

Theo Sumner leads a fairly uninteresting life, as far as he’s concerned. He lives with his mum, who is wheelchair bound from multiple sclerosis, who is also a terrible racist. He goes to school, works at a local motel (The Iggy) which is owned by the family of his crush Ari, and is occasionally bullied and bashed by the school bullies, Coley Briggs and Davo Davies. 

His uneventful life is shattered one day when Frank Maker, the creepy guy who is a permanent resident at the Iggy, discovers a pair of eyeballs on his bed. Strangely unconcerned by this turn of events, Maker calmly reports the incident to Theo, who later tells his mum what happened. His mum reveals that, oddly enough, she was the one who planted the eyeballs, as a warning to Maker to stay away from her son—apparently Frank Maker is his uncle. Theo finds this all very strange—and things only get stranger when, on his way to a Halloween party, he sees a man who looks very much like Maker kidnap Coley Briggs right off the street…only for the bully to appear again moments later and punch Theo.

Theo reports all these strange 

happenings to Ari, who agrees to help him investigate Maker’s room—but they are interrupted by Maker himself before they can proceed. Strange things keep occurring at school—Theo later witnesses a girl named Lani Lanchester being kidnapped, but he’s told that no such student has ever attended the school when he reports the matter. No one can remember Lani, not even Ari. The pair decide to investigate Maker’s room while the man is gone from the motel. They find nothing out of the ordinary, but when Maker returns unexpectedly Theo, hiding in the wardrobe, discovers a secret lift that leads deep underground to a strange facility.

When he eventually returns to the surface, Theo is shocked when he learns that he is one of eight missing children, who have apparently been gone for a whole year! Taken away to a suspicious facility, Theo soon determines that Medullo Industries, the mining corporation in town, are behind everything. Attempting to escape the facility, Theo ends up trapped in a laboratory and is exposed to a deadly dose of radiation…only to find himself falling from the wardrobe in his very own room the day he supposedly went missing.

Nothing makes sense, and as Theo continues to try to get to the bottom of things, he discovers he has strange powers, learns that Coley and Davo’s parents have been replaced by duplicates, and encounters creepy ‘zombie’ doubles of himself and the other missing children, before enduring a terrifying final confrontation with a terrible beast deep below the Medullo facilities.

Just when all seems lost, Theo wakes up in a hospital bed. It is revealed that he has been unconscious for some time, having been diagnosed with and undergone surgery for medulloblastoma, a type of brain cancer. The entire story, all his strange experiences in ‘Scorpion Falls’—which isn’t even a real place—were a hallucination resulting from his illness. Now, however, Theo is awake, and ready to rediscover who he is with his family—and his girlfriend, Ari.

An exciting and at times mind-bending adventure, this story is a thrilling ride from beginning to end. While it starts as a simple mystery, the plot steadily becomes more convoluted as the book progresses, with key pieces of information subtly changing and locations that are, at times, laid out in impossible ways. Astute readers may determine that Theo’s adventures aren’t quite what they seem before the eventual reveal, but said reveal is suitably satisfying when it does come, giving an explanation as to why and how such strange things occurred in an otherwise grounded and realistic setting.

bullying, mystery, unreliable narrator, experiments, cancer, investigation, false memories, hallucination

1. Mild non-graphic violence: Theo is bashed quite severely by Coley and Davo (p. 172-173). Frank Maker discovers a pair of eyeballs on his bed at p. 9, and this is mentioned a few times throughout the story, however they are revealed to be cows eyes and are never graphically described. Theo sees a bird disintegrated by radiation as part of an experiment at the Medullo lab, and it is stated that they do lots of other animal testing, but this is never shown. (p. 151-153) When Theo discovers the ‘zombie’ kids at the end of the story, he initially thinks they are dead bodies (p. 226-237). 2. Theo seems to gain the ability to bend, go through, and sometimes disintegrate solid materials including metal, wood, and people, after being exposed to radiation. While this ends up being part of his hallucination, Theo still utilises these powers a few times in the latter half of the story, notably when he accidently causes Davo’s head to separate from his body, yet continue to think and speak (p. 175). 3. Romance: Theo clearly has a crush on Ari throughout the story, however they aren’t in a relationship. She kisses his cheek, then his lips (p. 75). After Theo wakes at the end of the story, Ari is revealed as his ‘real-life’ girlfriend, but nothing further occurs. 4. Language: ‘Jeezus’ (as an exclamation, p. 34, 115), ‘sweet baby cheesus’ (p. 88, 96), ‘Jesus H Christ’ (p. 116), ‘Oh Jesus’ (p. 175, 179, 198, 256).