The Visitors
The Visitors Trilogy, books 1 - 3
Rodman Philbrick and Lynn Harnett
Scholastic
Fiction, MG Sci-Fi
Themes: Aliens
*
Description
Twins Nick and Jessie and their best friend Frasier have noticed many odd things lately, ever since that strange lightning-storm with its luminous
rain passed over the remote desert town of Harleyville. Their parents are acting like zombies, the wildlife's gone berserk, and there are strange
things going on up in Harley Hills.
This trilogy contains three books: Strange Invaders, Things, and Brain Stealers.
Review
I have got to stop buying books based on the cover art! These had such a wonderfully paranoid, X-Files feel to them, with the
colored lights and night skies and such, plus the three-buck price was right, that I picked up the first in this little series at the local Wal-Mart.
What a waste! Later, I picked up books 2 and 3 on clearance, just to see what happened (and hoping against hope that it would live up to the nifty
art that continued to grace the covers.) That was an even bigger waste! How bad was it? Well, you know the lowest rating on my scale? The one-star
"Terrible" one? This trilogy is why I put it there. Read on, and be warned.
There were a few nicely described scenes, with the luminous rain dripping from the trees in the yard and the twins being able to feel the other's
thoughts when in danger, but then it just got dumb. Frasier, after determining that something is seriously wrong, continues to pull off stupid stunts
to scare the twins, always at highly inappropriate moments. The kids know every adult in town’s acting strange, yet immediately trust a policeman who
shows up when they attempt to run away. When he turns them back over to their parents and goes into "zombie-mode," they are completely shocked. Myself,
I was shocked two pages earlier, when they trusted the man to begin with! The plot really broke down when possessed porcupines shot their quills at
the kids’ bike tires as they raced for the umpteenth time through the woods (which they knew full well to be inhabited by nasty, glowing-eyed critters
who used to be cute squirrels and happy birds), and it was in rigor mortis by the time they were gathering a glittering gold substance they called
mica. In my world, mica is a silver-colored mineral, but then again, in my world, porcupines can’t shoot their quills.
The explanation I blew six bucks to find out about was, hands down, the lamest of all lame explanations I have ever read. If you intend to read this
series, then skip the rest of this review - I’m about to spoil it for the sake of a good rant. Actually, I suggest that you seek counseling for such
self-destructive tendencies, then skip the rest of this review. Sorry, but I have to get my nine dollars out of the trilogy somehow, if not by enjoyable
reading then by a vindictive rending of the plot.
It turns out that the storm was a spaceship crashing into the hills (hands up, those of you who were surprised.) The adult aliens took over the minds of
Harleyville's grown-up population (no idea how) and wildlife (no idea why) to collect mica, which fuels their craft (no idea why they didn’t just get it
themselves, since they smashed their ship into a mountain full of the stuff.) In the course of their (often inept) investigations, the kids find a little
alien slimeball who tells them this (using mind-pictures based on a very human idea of how things work) and that it just wants to go home (insert sappy
music and mushy audience "ooohh!" here.) Thus, in a matter of (apparently) minutes, three kids scrounge up enough mica to fuel the alien spacecraft… a
task that hundreds of adults, digging tunnels under the entire town, have failed to do in a week. The slimeballs take off (no idea how, since they crashed
with sufficient force that parts of their ship were fused into the rocks of Harley Hills), the adults "wake up" without memory of the incident, and life
goes on as normal in sleepy little Harleyville. We are left with the question of whether they will return, and Frasier seems to hope that they will (geez,
did that kid learn nothing from the whole hellish experience?).
Oh, and there’s no explanation as to why the animals were possessed (just for the heck of it?), what the luminous rain was (perhaps the aliens dumped their
shipboard septic tanks on the way down - thus adding a whole new aspect to the scene where one of the kids tastes the stuff!), why the aliens were afraid of
wood (not a clue on this one), what the tunnels were for (obviously not mining mica!) or half a hundred other points raised in this lousy trilogy. The aliens
didn’t even bother to say "thank you." Of course, if three kids just dug up enough mica to blast them off this rock in a fraction of the time in which a whole
town did nothing but undermine their own homes, perhaps "thank you" wasn't the comment they had in mind.