Born Scared might have the simplest main premise I’ve ever read in a full novel; a young boy trying to walk a few blocks to a house. But if that sounds like a complete snooze, you’d be surprised with all it takes – and all that goes wrong – in this nice little tale about facing fears while incredibly terrified.
Our hero is a young teen named Elliot, and his twin sister Ellamay, who died at birth and never had a name but he sees her spirit. Talks with her all the time. Apart from that, there’s his mother (no father in the picture), and Shirley, who fills out Elliot’s prescriptions for his anxiety medication. Pretty much everyone else is a “monkem” to Elliot, which is, in other words, an unknown stranger out to hurt him. He was born terrified of the world, and one day on Christmas Eve, a pharmacy messes up his medications and his mom goes to Shirley’s for an emergency replenish…but she doesn’t come back. She’s not answering her phone. And it’s a total blizzard in their little suburb. So Elliot is forced to brave the cold and the dangerous to get to Shirley’s and figure out what went wrong, and he will find himself in the middle of an unexpected little crime.
Elliot’s fears of just about everything are so entrenched and established inside of him, that him going to the supermarket is to most others like facing down a feral grizzly bear. These people exist – maybe they have PTSD from surviving a horrible event, or life’s not given them enough reason to trust the unknown, or maybe like Elliot, it’s a condition they were born with. And in my opinion, Kevin Brooks gave us a really good view of Elliot’s head and his phantom twin sister, treating his condition with compassion without overindulgence. And by tapping into someone this scared of the world around him, it reminds us of all our own biggest fears, and how we have all at one point or another felt like the powerless 12-year-old wanting to fix the world but knowing it is more than willing to kill us if we try, and it might just be a matter of time before it kills us anyway.
Some readers might grow impatient of Elliot’s neediness. He talks about how his mother tried to enroll him in the regular school twice, and both times left him traumatized for weeks. While reading, I felt that tug between understanding and tough love, wanting him to be able to get his pill supply replenished and not be so terrified but also wanting a circumstance where he’d have to face his fears and realize not everything is so distrusting, and living in fear is worse than not going out and seeing the beauty there can be. When the adventure really starts, I was all in, and Brooks managed to make Elliot’s fears feel at-times quite legitimate even to someone without his condition, not an easy feat to pull off.
There are a multitude of side characters and stories going off at the same time, in a book less than 250 pages long, and none of them overstay their welcome. There’s one involving a car chase that made me think about life for a brief moment, and some side dialogue with the bad guys reminded me of the movies I used to watch as a kid with bumbling antagonists who second guess and make mistakes in silly and sometimes charming ways.
Born Scared is a little book that revels in simplicity, with a sort-of low-budget horror movie feel and an unpretentious charm.
My grade: 3 and a half stars out of 5
William J. McGinn 
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