Welcome to Hollow Hills! A small town filled with secrets and spooky things!

First up a big thank you to my hubby for gifting me this one during Christmas!

This time not x stories but 3 stories set in the same place with overlaps in characters. I did enjoy them and I loved the fact it was all connected and that it all was set in one very small town with just a few stores and one elementary school. And that all the kids are at the same school. I always love it when we get interconnecting (that is the word right) stories. Hollow Hills sounds like a fun place, well, at first. Because after reading this I am not sure if I would want to visit. I mean a lot of things go bump in the town.

There are three stories, three novellas. The first one about a boy obsessed with superheroes (and trying to escape his evil twin brother) ends up at a strange comic store and from there in a spooky alternate universum filled with discontinued heroes/villains. I really enjoyed this story and I love seeing him collect comics and get super enthusiastic about it. The only thing I didn’t like from the story was the brother. I really wish that parents would just be a bit stricter instead of just blaming both of them. I really loved the spooky discontinued world full of dangers and I loved reading about the heroes and villains there. Yup, you hear that right, everything ends there and it was so cool. Though not so cool for our MC who has to run for his life. I was very excited about the ending to this story as it was an ending you don’t often see in books. But it made me squee in happiness!

The second story was about a girl working at a petshop and deciding to do dumb shit. I mean, hello girl, how do you want me to root for you if right from the bat you do stupid forbidden stuff? I also didn’t like this story as it ruined the ending to the first story for me. I was so happy with that one (as said above) and then we learn THAT and I was just pissed. Plus, I didn’t entirely get the friendship between the girls, it seemed very toxic and I would have dropped that friend like a hot potato after all the shit she does. There were fun moments though, I loved the petshop, loved the crazy professor type and his mysterious new critters, love Donegal who was just a big good boy with tons of love to give, and I loved the big dose of karma that came along for our MC (I won’t spoil what, but I was giggling in delight at it all).

The third story is about a mysterious new teacher and lots of howling and I liked this story until the end because in none of the stories we have ever gotten a hint about this and I think that would have made this story so much better if we were in the know about it or if we had at least gotten hints. I did like the story and the teacher was pure Goosebumps material, perfect! I had a giggle at the constant howling.

I also loved the introduction to each story on why R.L. Stine wrote this story and what inspired him.

And there are also illustrations at the start of the stories, I would have loved to see more illustrations than just at the start, I think seeing some of the spooky things would have made things even more spooky/fun!

So while I did have fun and I loved the town with all its spooky things, I just had some issues with this one and so I won’t be rating it a 5 (or 5+) stars like the other 3 books. This one will be getting 4.5 stars. It is still good and I would still highly recommend it, but I just hope next time we either get a 10 story collection again or less annoying brothers/more hints.