Does this ever happen to you? When I read something, I generally hear the words pretty much spoken inside my head as I read them. Mostly . . . though sometimes, when I'm reading a truly great book, I start to feel that what I'm hearing inside my skull is more akin to music, almost, like some sort of lovely concerto version of the words on the page.

But then, sometimes, with not-so-great books, what I start to hear after I've been reading for a while is more of an irksome whine or a grating rumble, like the sound of a car being driven on a flat tire. And reading The Monsters of Templeton, I found my head filled with an ongoing screech, loudly interrupted by repeated painful jarring clanks as, every couple of pages, my eye was dragged across yet another brutally inapt metaphor or wince-inducing misuse of the poor English language.

This book has all the usual hallmarks of bad pretentious fiction--characters that the reader is told repeatedly are wickedly funny, though we're never so blessed as to hear one of them say anything witty. Modern-day characters with names like Primus Dwyer, Aristabulus Mudge, Zeke Felcher. Yes, Felcher. Oh, and Reverend John Melkovitch. Yes, John Melkovitch. Overlarded sentences. Obscure and utterly unpersuasive similes. Misused words. Patent absurdities given as plot points.

"She patted my hand, leaving cheese flakes on my fingers." Cheese . . . flakes?

". . . the streets, as familiar to us as the whorls in our own fingertips." I don't believe I have the slightest f. clue what my fingerprints look like. Do you?

Clarissa, who "could quote Nietszsche . . . was the most puntastic person I'd ever met," comes down with lupus, and they discuss "famous people who'd had it: Flannery O'Connor (A good disease is not hard to find, Clarissa had punned then. . . ." WHAT? That is not a pun.

"I looked into the mirror and saw that the pen I was chewing had exploded over my face, even dripping under my chin and onto my neck, and my teeth and tongue were stained, and that I, in my ignorance, had smeared black ink all over my cheeks and forehead." WHAT?!? Come on. Really. Could that happen?

The author seems not to know that there is kind of a big difference between a cross and a crucifix, and that the two words really can't be used interchangeably when the person wearing the cross is a protestant. She thinks that someone "dressed in a pink Polo shirt underneath a yellow sweater" would look "as yuppie as a person who was not a yuppie but wanted to look like a yuppie could look." Yuppie? Maybe it's been so long since anyone's heard that word that we've forgotten that yuppie and preppie are not the same thing? She thinks it's possible to punch someone and "split one of his teeth in two." Split? She thinks storms have epicenters. She thinks that "I called Clarissa for hours" is the same as "I talked on the phone with Clarissa for hours." She thinks the phrase "He began to write and write, with a promiscuity that's surprising. . . ." is somehow sensible. Her narrator repeatedly--repetitively, even--tells us what a tough smart cookie she is, yet she somehow never manages to question her mother's assertion that she was born after ten and a half months in the womb.

Oh, sheesh, I could go on and on. But I'll cut myself short and give out this advice: Don't read it.