"A high-interest, modern-day horror series. Each story features unusual teen problems that occur in a small New England town. In Skin, Nick Barry's face starts to break out in a rash while his bones feel like living ice. An extreme anger starts to pulsate within him. With the help of friends, he slowly discovers an ancient evil possessor hiding within him. In Thaw, strange and awful things start to happen as the teens start to lose their grip on reality. After Dani's best friend, Jake, is kidnapped by an infamous thawed-out cult leader, they both enter an alternate, yet dangerous reality that might cost them their lives. In The Protectors, Luke's angry stepfather works as a mortician, while his mother conducts séances. Living in a funeral home that has its own secrets starts to take its toll on Luke when his mother dies in a car accident. Sounds of screams and rattling chains plague his dreams. Is his mother really dead? He soon discovers a secret as terrifying as he once imagined. Each short book delivers an entertaining horrific tale, leaving appreciative readers gasping for breath." --School Library Journal

"Luke leads a life beset by death. His deranged stepfather, Sal, has apprenticed Luke in the mortuary arts at the Signorelli Funeral Home since Luke was nine. His mom serves their town, Bridgewater, as a medium for communicating with the dead. Little seems out of the ordinary until Luke's mom confides in him that her protectors are trying to warn her of impending danger. But when she fails to return home from a séance one evening and is declared dead, Luke, too, begins to receive messages―clues―from beyond the grave. The excerpt from Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven' that opens The Protectors is astutely chosen. Beyond the dark, macabre content that fills the tale, Karlsson weaves a story that is highly readable in one sitting―a quality Poe would appreciate―and a narrative fabric that finds its heritage in Poe's accounts of ratiocination, horror, and the grotesque." --The ALAN Review

"Things aren't exactly going well for 16-year-old Luke. It's not the work at his stepfather's funeral home that bothers him–Luke's been handling dead bodies since he was a kid. It's the arguments between his mother and stepfather, Sal, which peak shortly before Luke's mother is killed in a fiery car crash. Following her death, Sal's moods become frightening, and Luke begins noticing signs everywhere: a release of gas from a corpse that sounds like 'help her'; a dead woman's finger seemingly pointing at a supply closet; mysterious iPod behavior; maple syrup on pancakes spelling out his mother's name. Karlsson's clues are rather haphazard, and what the book gains in readability for reluctant readers, it loses in intelligibility. But the goings-on in the lonely funeral home are effectively eerie, and the details of cadaver restoration and embalming give the novel a believable (if kinda icky) edge. If your teens dig this, try the other books in the Night Fall series, all of which take place in the unlucky town of Bridgewater." --Booklist

"These short horror stories are set in the town of Bridgewater, where things are never quite what they seem. The stories are uniformly creepy and full of spirits and demons, as good rises up to fight evil. One title is about a boy who works in a funeral home and receives messages from the dead; another about a girl who travels to a dream world to rescue her best friend; and the third is about a boy who is possessed by a demon. Younger fans of horror might enjoy these stories, but I found them more vaguely unpleasant than truly scary." --Library Media Connection

Author of The Protectors.