Our hero is 11-year-old Robert Arthur, and he's among the first students entering the brand new Lovecraft Middle School (LMS). The town is a buzz over the extraordinary new facility and its many state-of-the-art features. Solar panels! Radiant floor heating! Wireless internet! Digital smart-boards in every classroom! LMS is truly the school of the future. Better still, it's a totally green building, constructed almost entirely of recycled materials. But Robert soon discovers some strange mysteries. Rats in the lockers. A student goes missing. And he encounters an old section in the school library - a corridor full of worm-eaten, antiquated books. How did such a musty dusty room end up in a brand new school? Even worse, Robert's new science professor is behaving really strangely - it will become clear over the course of the book that the professor has been consumed by some kind of demon/wraith/spirit, that it's transforming him into a monster from the inside-out. Robert tries to unravel these mysteries with some help from his new friend Karina Ortiz - but soon she presents him with yet another conundrum: Why has he never seen Karina outside the walls of Lovecraft Middle School?
The answers to all of these riddles lie in the fact that LMS was constructed almost entirely of recycled materials - but these materials came from the abandoned Tillinghast mansion, a large ancestral home and hotbed of weirdo paranormal activity. After decades of unpaid taxes, violent episodes, and unexplained phenomena, the state government tore down the hospital but then essentially REBUILT the same materials into a new building. And thus Lovecraft Middle School was born. By the end of this first volume, Robert will vanquish Professor Gargoyle and learn the creepy origin story of LMS. But his troubles are just beginning. There's something odd about the lunch lady in the cafeteria ...and report cards are getting mailed home next week!
Quirk publishes extremely aesthetically pleasing books, and PG is no exception. It looks and it feels amazing – such high quality for a MG book.
Professor Gargoyle is the story of Robert Arthur, who starts at a new school that just recently has been built. At first it seems just like any school, but within the first day strange things start happening; rats appear in lockers, thingy gets lost in the high-tech library and winds up in an ancient attic. And on op of that all there is something wrong with the chemistry teacher…
I loved that Professor Gargoyle combines both a feel of gothic horror and contemporary technologies. The school is all new and shiny, yet it still feels spooky. It was nice to see a horror kind of story play out at something else than an old mansion.
The story of Professor Gargoyle was very enjoyable, but at times the writing felt slightly stilted or overly formal. It didn’t,t flow effortlessly just yet. It might just be a first book in the series kind of thing, and I hope Gilman’s writing improves in the second book of the series, The Slither Sisters.
It takes a little while to get things going and to introduce all of characters. Once the adventure really takes off, Professor Gargoyle is suspenseful and imaginative just as it should be. It suffers a from being the first book in the series, but I have high hopes for the sequel. Recommended for lovers of horror/adventure MG books.
