I haven't done this for a while! In the six months I was in Costa Rica, English language books were hard to come by, and I ended up paying several dollars for a tattered paperback. So when I came back to the United States, one of the first things I did was go to the Dollar Tree to once again indulge in the process of buying books, just because I could! And thus, Creepers: The Scarecrow, written by the presumably pseudonymous "Edgar J. Hyde" and illustrated by the (less presumably pseudonymous) Chloe Tyler.
As far as I can tell, the "Creepers" series is basically a rehash of the now three-decade venerable "Goosebumps" series. The back even says that it is distributed by Greenbrier International, the actual corporate name of the Dollar Tree. So whereas most books at the Dollar Tree seem to be remaindered, this seems to have been ordered especially for The Dollar Tree. In other words, these are books that seem to have taken the formulaic approach of the Goosebumps series, but produced exclusively for sale at The Dollar Tree, and written through ghostwriters. Does this sound like it could be the ultimate in cheesiness?
Also, the logo for the series seems to have been lifted from the font and design of "Stranger Things". Could I get anything out of something derivative and schlocky?
The story is set sometime in the past, maybe in the 1980s, but it isn't very specific. It is set on a small farm with some financial difficulties, where our protagonist, David, lives with his parents and sisters. The story starts quickly when our Everykid Protagonist finds a injured man in the barn--- a man who has had his tongue ripped out. They quickly find out that this man is a local thief and lowlife. The story quickly moves on to where a drifter who was harmless but an annoyance also gets his tongue ripped out. And then we have a break in the action for two things to happen: David finds that the creepy scarecrow out in the field has a weird message enscribed on it about keeping the peace of the land...and a greedy banker who threatens the farm. In the final burst of action, the banker is killed by the scarecrow, and then David ends up killing the scarecrow.
Some of this action might seem predictable, and the fact that the antagonist is a scarecrow might be pretty easy to guess from a book entitled "The Scarecrow". But some of the subtext of this book is extremely important. The scarecrow is not interested in protecting the family, only the land. And the targets of his wrath are people who are either below or above the working-class family. And if you go and read your Facebook feed in 2024, you will see the targets of populism are people who are either too poor or too rich (depending on which aunt/uncle you are getting memes from). So this book takes a populist theme--- that a spirit of the land protects the common people from deviants and elites--- and reverses it, because the scarecrow doesn't care for the people, just for "the land". Populism doesn't care about people, just about The People. Which of course, is quite a message to get from a single kind of cheesy knock-off of a Goosebumps book at a Dollar Tree, but it really raises the questions of why more erudite channels haven't pointed out that The last dozen years of populism have been a miserable failure.