BLOODLINE is the third book I've read by Jess Lourey and I think it's her best yet. The other two books were coming-of-age stories that took place in a landscape of horror. In this book, the heroine is a full-grown adult woman who wants to have a family and a career as expectations for women are changing-- set against a landscape of suspicion and horror. After being mugged, Joan decides to retreat to her fiance, Deck's, hometown of Lilydale in Minnesota. An idealistic little town where the motto is "Come Home Forever." But if you're at all familiar with Lourey's works, they're basically all about fucked-up small towns in Minnesota and naturally, BLOODLINE is no exception. Come home forever, indeed.
Right away, something is off. There's a sort of narc culture in town. Everyone's in her business and watching her all the time. Her parents-in-law to be are kind of creepy. There's a secret society of sorts in town. They're weirdly obsessed with the town founders. And she can't help but feel like her fiance is hiding something from her. Something, you know... big.
This book was basically a list of all my fave tropes. I loved that it was set in the 60s, which gave it a fun retro bent. I liked the homage it paid to classic horror novels, like ROSEMARY'S BABY or, like, some of Stephen King's earlier works. I liked how the author wasn't afraid to go "there" and really deliver on that star finish of a horrific reveal. And I liked how the heroine was a reporter, which kind of made her Nancy Drew shenanigans a little more believable.
So I have a project called What the Actual F*** Wednesday where I read the weirdest of the weird. My friends and followers nominate books they want to see me read, and this title was recommended to me by like three people this week, so I guess I just had to read it.
Steve, the hero, has an eccentric girlfriend. She has all these "cute" quirks, like the fact that she stayed in college until she was thirty majoring in useless things, or the fact that she's fluent in Russian even though she's Thai because she was adopted, or that she goes to seafood restaurants and orders steak, or that she likes to lick-- yes, that's right, LICK-- her glasses clean. Like she's a cat or something, IDK. I don't make the rules.
One day, while Stacy, Ms. Quirkycentric, and Steve, are doing it, he hears strange noises coming from "down there," and there's a skeleton hand "down there," and suddenly she's birthed a skeleton. The whole thing weirds them out so much that they immediately go out for a drink, and Stacy decides that the thing to do is to have Steve go up "there" on the most horrible spelunking journey ever to figure out what's really going on in her chamber of secrets if you get me.
Well, he does... and it's horrible. Like, the description of it is horrible and what goes on in there is horrible. I'm not sure I can actually describe it all in detail since I'm cross-posting this review to Amazon, but, like, the plastic girl on the cover is Stacy's imaginary childhood friend Fig who's, I guess, made out of plastic. And there's like a whole demonic "Narnia" in there. And eventually Steve ends up putting down literal and figurative roots in there, becoming a permanent plastic resident of this horrible Narnia, shacking up with Fig and treating us to some of the worst sex scenes I've ever read.
Don't even get me started on the scene when Steve finds out Stacy is cheating on him WHILE HE'S IN "THERE." I've read some truly messed up stuff for the sake of this project, but this was some serious nightmare fuel. You've heard of manic pixie dreamgirls? Well, these are manic demon nightmaregirls.
I can't believe I spent five bucks on this. The things I do for y'all, I swear.
HOUSE OF HOLLOW is one of the best horror stories I've ever read. I don't even normally like horror because I am a soft and jellied wimp, but I do like fairytales, and this is like the darkest of the lot: a story of three girls who went missing at the stroke of midnight while their parents fretted and worried, only for them to return, not quite the same, with matching scars on their throats and discolored hair and eyes. Ten years later, Vivi, Grey, and Iris Hollow are beautiful and exceptional girls, but beneath all of the gloss is the dark shadow of their shared pasts and the truth of why they really went missing.
Part of what made this such a win for me is the beautiful prose. It's like biting into a truffle, only to find it filled with rot. The exquisite writing masks the horrors until it's too late to run and by that point, you're so invested, you probably won't even want to. And don't be fooled by the dreamy teen narrator and the flowers on the cover: this book has triggers of all kinds, with many scenes of body horror, and some pretty emotionally devastating blows. There's one scene towards the end that really wrecked me and nearly made me cry.
I would recommend this to people who like really dark stories that explore deep topics and horror that goes beyond splatterpunk and gore. The whole time I was reading this book, I kept picturing it as a movie, with the same visuals as movies like Velvet Buzzsaw, Paradise Hills, and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. I think if you enjoy those things, you'll probably like this book, too.
What even was this book? It was weird as all get out and I'm not really sure what genre it was trying to be because it was so many things. I didn't really like the narrative style at all and the world-building didn't work for me at all. I bought this because I'm on a creepy YA bender and a lot of my friends really liked WILDER GIRLS-- but a lot of my friends also really didn't like WILDER GIRLS and I think I side with them.
I normally don't review books I return for a refund because I feel like it's a double-kick in the pants for the author, but I'm stupid enough to accidentally buy this book again so I'm writing this as a note to myself not to purchase HOW TO SURVIVE A HORROR MOVIE a second time. I actually didn't see when it was published and if I had, I probably wouldn't have purchased it. It came out in the mid-2000s and the humor reflects that. As others have pointed out, it doesn't really age all that well and comes across as, uh, "dated." Take that how you will.
My sister and I have started trading books back and forth during quarantine and this is the one she wanted me to read first before giving it to her. This is one of the instances where I read the book after seeing the movie. It's a grim dystopia/post-apocalyptic book where a "blindness" plague infects an unnamed society in an unnamed city. Rather than plunging into darkness, the victims find themselves inhabiting a strange, misty whiteness-- and it's highly infectious.
The main characters are never named except for their characteristics. So we have "the first blind man," who stops traffic when he gets out of his car panicking because he is blind. We have the thief who takes him home and offers to wait for him-- and then steals his car. Then we have the blind man's wife, the ophthalmologist, a woman with dark glasses who moonlights as a prostitute, a boy with a squint, a man with an eye patch, and the doctor's wife who, miraculously, remains immune.
One of the chief complaints of this book is the punctuation style and it does make things book very hard to read. The author, for whatever reason, made the choice to not include quotation marks or normal sentences, so dialogue is marked by writing paragraphs that read like this, And then the next branch of dialogue is donated by a capital A, Even when someone else is talking, you ask? Yes, even when someone else is talking, But that sounds confusing you say, Yes, it is, and it results in paragraphs that last for multiple pages, Oh my God, you say, That sounds terrible, It is.
The story itself is equally unpalatable. The blind are shepherded into an empty mental asylum which quickly disintegrates into chaos. The conditions quickly become unsanitary. The military guards shoot up the inhabitants out of blind (if you pardon the unintended pun) fear, and then they stand by and do nothing when an opportunistic gang forms demanding first money and loot as payment and then women and sex in exchange for the food that they have immorally co-opted. Even when freed from the asylum, those who escape find themselves in a society at its very last dregs, where all humanity is lost.
I liked the book okay and thought it told a compelling albeit depressing story, but I probably wouldn't read it again. So many descriptions of vomiting and shit and human waste, and humans performing inhuman acts at the cost of their own survival. It didn't occur to me while reading this book that a dystopian epidemic might not be the best choice of reading material during COVID, but here it is and here I am. It's not a book I'd recommend, but it's a book you won't forget.
I live near a pretty bustling Little Free Library and I am always trekking over to it with a backpack full of books and offloading my past reads before checking out what's new. The upside of it being so busy is that I'm constantly finding cool things in there that I might not have found or picked up otherwise, like this book: THE GIRL IN THE LAKE. Look at that cover and tell me that you don't feel the slow creep of dread wrapping itself around you like a tattered cloak.
Despite the pretty creepy cover, THE GIRL IN THE LAKE isn't that scary. That said, the cover creeped me out enough that I definitely stored the cover upside-down because I didn't want the demon-eyed little girl watching me while I slept. I'M ONLY HUMAN, OKAY? But the cover is literally the scariest thing about the book. The creeps served up in this book are basically a 1.5 on the Goosebumps scale. I'm still traumatized from WELCOME TO DEAD HOUSE, even as an adult.
Celeste is taken to her grandparents' lakehouse along with her brother, Owen, to hang out with their cousins, Daisy and Capri. Celeste just failed a swim test so the plan seems to be to make her be like, "Oh, swimming is actually fun!" with bougie lake exposure. But the lake actually is not fun, and the house actually seems to be haunted.
Celeste was a decent main character. I liked that the author allowed her to be a little bratty (as little kids are) but she also wanted to be nice and be thought of as nice. The "mystery" of her great-aunt wasn't all that mysterious and I thought it was a little shitty how they kept gaslighting the kids. But as a kid, I remember asking my mom if she would believe me if I told her there was some ghost shit happening in our house and she straight up lied to my face and said, "Yes honey," when we both know it would have been straitjacket o' clock if I started talking about werewolves and ghosts and green slime. Soooo I guess a little bit of suspension of disbelief is required.
If you like Goosebumps, I think you'll love this. It's cheesy but offers some great commentary about the history of racial segregation in the U.S. and I learned some interesting facts about Dorothy Dandridge.
I have a new policy that I drop books I'm not feeling and this is one of those books. I have enjoyed some of Alma Katsu's other books, specifically The Taker trilogy, but this one just felt so flat and wooden. I actually had the pleasure of going to a talk about the Donner party recently and it was really interesting because their ill-fated journey was kind of a blend of bad luck and misinformation. They weren't bad people, they just did what they needed to survive and it was awful. The exploitative paranormal twist (I read spoilers) felt kind of distasteful to me. Maybe I wouldn't have minded so much if I hadn't gone to the talk, but after reading spoilers and seeing the direction in which this was headed (I was getting Old West Game of Thrones vibes), I was like, "Nah."
THE HACIENDA has been on my to-read list ever since I learned of its existence. As someone who is a huge fan of old skool gothic novels, this sounded like it was going to be everything I loved about the genre, infused with Mexican history and culture.
Beatriz's father was killed as a traitor during the overthrowing of the Mexican government. After that, she and her mother were left at the mercy of distant relatives, who resented their presence and treated Beatriz cruelly for being too dark. When she meets Rodolfo and he proposes marriage, it seems like a dream come true: he has the fair good looks of the upper-class and runs an agave plantation that is used to make pulque. San Isidro is so massive that there is plenty of room to send for her mother and have the two of them live happily ever after.
But pretty soon it becomes obvious that a traditional ending is not in the cards. Beatriz sees and hears what appear to be apparitions and there is a darkness, a coldness, that runs through the house. Her new sister in law, Juana, does not appear to care for her, and there are terrible rumors about her husband, Rodolfo. The only one who can help her is a priest named Andres, but he has secrets as well. If Beatriz is unable to fix what is wrong with the hacienda, her life might be in terrible danger. But so might be everyone else's, too.
So this was really good. The writing was beautiful and spare and I thought the atmosphere was amazing. Cañas did a great job staying true to the classic gothic formula, and there were scenes in it that scared the shit out of me. I liked all the characters I was supposed to like and hated all the characters I was supposed to hate. The ending was fantastic, too. My only qualm was that the characterization was a little bland. I guess I was hoping for more nuance from some of the characters. Beatriz and Andres felt pretty interchangeable as narrators. It sure was great for a debut, though, and I honestly thought it was a lot better than MEXICAN GOTHIC (it's weird that they're being compared so much because they have totally different writing styles and HACIENDA runs circles around MG, in my opinion).
I normally read some pretty weird things that are off the beaten path of what most book bloggers read and review, but this week is Hype Week, and I'm going to be reading a lot of the things that EVERYONE reads and see for myself whether or not the books are Worth the Hype™.
COMFORT ME WITH APPLES has been on my radar for a while. Every time I saw the cover, it freaked me out. I was also intrigued by the premise, which gave me STEPFORD WIVES/Bluebeard vibes, and when I read the sample on Kindle, I loved the writing style. I am not a horror fan at ALL, but I love fairytale horror. One of my favorite recent horror novels was called HOUSE OF HOLLOW, and this seemed to cater to those who enjoy that same goth fantasy aesthetic.
The premise is pretty simple. Sophia lives in a beautiful house in a gated community with a husband who adores and spoils her. But then one day, she starts noticing little things-- locked doors, mysterious items-- that hint at a dark rot of uncertainty tainting her perfect life. She starts to question not just her husband, but also herself. And that is dangerous, indeed.
I don't want to say too much more about this book but I think it is a feminist tale (although it's couched in tragedy), and I think it's also a criticism of the misogyny that's latent in a lot of subsets of Judeo-Christian religions. I personally am not religious, so this didn't bother me at all, but I did wonder if this critique was what caused this book to have such mixed reviews among my friends. The fairytale aspect will also not appeal to everyone but I personally loved it. Can't wait to read more from this author.
Quirk Books is one of my go-tos for weird entertainment, so when I saw that CURSED OBJECTS was on sale in the Kindle Store, I naturally had to buy it. Joke's on me! This book is apparently cursed and it's bad news bears for you if you pirated your copy, according to the author. After all, you were WARNED.
This is a collection of cursed objects and their histories. Most of them are pretty famous, like the Hope Diamond, Ötzi the Iceman, the Dybbuk box from eBay, Annabelle the Doll, and the like, but there were some that were new to me, like the taboo Maori treasures that pregnant and menstruating women were initially soft-banned from seeing pending a curse apocalypse of doom and I-told-you-so, and something called the Silvianus ring, which, LEGEND has it, inspired the One Ring from LotR. Gollum not included.
I thought this book was pretty fun and it was clear that the author was having a great time (you gotta love a passion project), but this fell a little short for me for several reasons. First, when they say that it's "illustrated" they mean with little drawings. There are no photographs. I'm not sure if it was too expensive to buy the rights to repost the photographs or if maybe taking photographs of cursed items felt like it was pushing your karmic chances (probably true), but either way, it made me feel like I was being deprived of part of the experience of looking at the cursed abyss and having it look back before I run screaming from the room because the abyss is a DOLL.
Second, this kind of feels like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: Nonfiction Edition. I feel like I would have been wowed by these if I were a preteen or younger (which is maybe the target age for this book?) but as an adult and a believer in SCIENCE, it was mostly an exercise in credulity. Curses, as the author even points out at the end of the book, become a kind of ourboros of their own lore: once you set the idea of a curse in motion, confirmation bias takes effect and people start to only remember incidents that conform to the idea of their being a curse in the first place. I also wondered if part of the reason so many British and American people thought their (stolen) Egyptian and Indian treasures were cursed was a sort of projected feeling of cognitive dissonance over colonist guilt for stealing cultural artifacts. I mean, you have these items that are of serious cultural and ceremonial import and you are taking them and I'm sure, deep down, that made people feel a bit funny. And maybe "it's cursed!" was easier to swallow than "I am a jerk who is thieving the cultural vaults of other countries!"
Anyway, this was a fun, quick read-- Quirk rarely disappoints-- but not a keeper. Still, why tempt fate? I'm steering well clear of any cursed boxes, dolls, or totems I find on eBay, THANKS.
I made a TikTok recently where I was talking about two of my favorite gothic romances, and in the video I said that one of my favorite microtropes is, "Is the house really haunted, or are they just crazy?" THE WOMAN IN THE DARK is that microtrope, only without the romance. Well, there's hints of romance. But it's fucked up.
This is my first book by this author and I thought it was really well done. She nailed the intensely psychological element. This is paced like a movie and had me gripping the pages (metaphorically, since it was an ebook) with white knuckled hands. I will say that you should be careful reading this going in, though. It portrays emotional and physical abuse quite gruesomely, and also has on-page rape.
I wasn't sure where the author was going with this book until the very end, although I had my suspicions. It was pretty well done, I thought, although the ending felt a little rushed and kind of surreal.
Are you there God? It's me, Trash Can. Years and years ago, twenty-something-year-old Nenia stockpiled YA like it was going out of fashion. Little did she know, it basically was. All those HG dystopias and prom dress paranormals would soon go the way of Vanilla Ice and parachute pants, along with all other bizarre and slightly embarrassing trends that normal people would like to forget.
Too bad for everyone else, I'm not normal. And my Vanilla Ice-listening, parachute pants-wearing ass just loooooooves bad YA.*
*I don't actually own any parachute pants or Vanilla Ice CDs. But, you know, I totally would.**
**Probably.
Anyway, THE FOREST OF HANDS AND TEETH is a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel set in a world inhabited by zombies, called Unconsecrated. It's part Night of the Living Dead (1968) and part The Village (2004). Mary lives in a village that is cordoned off by fences. When the sirens sound, they retreat to towers or lock themselves in. But one day, an outside girl comes... and everything changes. Mary learns that their world might not be as isolated as they thought, nor as safe.
I personally really enjoyed this book a lot. The dreamy story-telling, the emotional stakes, the fact that the heroine is allowed to be unlikable and selfish, the world-building. I am not usually one for zombie stories, honestly. I think they're gross. I'm a vampire girl-- I like my undead with fangs. But Ryan really sold it. When Mary and her friends, Cass, Travis, Harry, Beth, and Jed (well, he's her brother, but you know) are wandering through the network of fenced paths, heading towards the unknown, it feels so claustrophobic and tense. I found myself quickly sucked into the story and finished it in a day.
The thing I think a lot of people won't like about this book is that there is a love square (Mary likes Travis, who is engaged to Cass, who is in love with Harry, who is engaged to Mary) and the heroine really comes off as selfish in a lot of the book. Also, it's depressing as hell.
But apart from that, it honestly felt pretty fresh and enjoyable to me, and I think if you like The Village and zombie movies, you'll really like this book. It's like a teen soap opera version of The Walking Dead, and if that makes you want to read this book, you're probably well within the target audience. I own the whole "trilogy" but I must note that the two subsequent books are "companion" books. Mary's story ends with this one and the other two books each feature different narrators. That disappointed me a little bit because if I really like a story and am invested in a character enough to read further into the series, I generally like it to be about that character, but I'm still interested in seeing what Ryan does with this world.
I read a LOT of Caroline B. Cooney growing up but there were still some titles that eluded me. One of them was NIGHT SCHOOL, which really intrigued me because as a night owl, part of me has always kind of secretly wished that school could be at night so I could sleep all day. But this is NOT an insomniac's utopia, no. The night school described in this book is actually... sinister.
When a notice appears on the school bulletin board inviting people to sign up for Night School, Mariah, Ned, Andrew, and Autumn all feel compelled to write their names on the list. All of them have secrets. All of them are hoping to get something out of the night class. All of them have something in common. When they get to the school at night, they discover that their instructor is sinister and so is his lesson plan. At night class, they learn to become one with the dark-- and scare the shit out of people.
The powers of the instructor are actually pretty similar to those of the vampire in her vampire trilogy and so is the way his smile is described. The plot is also very similar to the plot of Fatal Bargain, the last book in her vampire series, where teens basically spend the whole time talking about people to sacrifice. Because that is what people do in night class; they feed off of people's terror by exploiting their fears.
I liked the book okay but I felt like it was anticlimactic in a lot of ways. I kept expecting Mariah's big humiliating secret to be blown or for her to have to save her brother. It felt like the author was foreshadowing something like that but it never went anywhere. Then what happened with Andrew at the end totally came out of left field. Autumn seemed more like she might be the weak link. I felt like that should have been foreshadowed more, too. And as others said, the ending is abrupt.
This basically does what her vampire series does, only not as well.
UNTIL THE END has been sitting on my bookshelf gathering dust for years until I finally decided to purge my bookshelves of some of my old YA and middle grade novels (I'm more interested in mystery and romance these days). But because I'm compulsive as fuck, I figured what better way to give these a final send-off than to binge-read everything I can get my grubby hands on? If I don't like it, I DNF. Either way, a winner is me.
This trilogy is a repackaging of Pike's 90s thriller trilogy, The Final Friends. I was really pleasantly surprised by these books, to be honest. I was expecting the usual Point Horror-esque cheap thrillers and instead I found myself being sucked down a rabbit hole of sex, violence, school rivalries, and madness, with a locked-room mystery premise to boot. How did I miss this series growing up? I would have LOVED it. Deadly parties are one of my FAVORITE tropes.
I don't think I've binged a series so fast in a while and these books are relatively young for pulp YA. My omnibus edition was 800+ pages and I finished it in TWO. DAYS. Books two and three I read back to back in one day. That's how badly I wanted to find out what happens. Because Pike does something truly evil. Book one doesn't give you any closure. Neither does book two. To find out the identity of the murderer from book one, you have to wade through the drama of all three books.
I know right?
But I think the wait is worth the pay-off. The characters are all fleshed-out and interesting (for pulp) and I liked that the author actually lets the teens do bad teen things, like underage drinking or relationship drama. These teens are not squeaky clean and aren't afraid to let you know it. A lot of these teen pulps feel really old-fashioned and use 50s slang, because I think the authors writing them were probably teens themselves in the 50s, so they refer to dances as "hops" and frequent malt shops and have ice cream socials. These teens want to party and get laid, which makes the books feel more modern, although I must say that there are some pretty serious trigger warnings across the board for virtually everything, as this series touches upon subjects like abortion, self-harm, and racism.
It's like no other vintage YA I've ever read before and for that alone it would have probably gotten a pretty positive rave from me, but I like that it had such a compulsively readable storyline, too.
FINALLY! After three books of build-up, I finally get the closure I've desperately been seeking. The Final Friends trilogy has a pretty unique formula in that the first book is an introduction to a murder mystery with more and more build-up and character development until you get to book three and realize what's really going on.
It's been a while since I read through a series like this in chronological order in a short burst like this. It's strangely invigorating, like chugging shots or running a marathon. I couldn't really put it down. Even though it's trashy as all get-out, I loved how gritty it was and how much time was spent on developing the characters. A lot of these YA pulps feel pretty stock but it's clear that Pike spent time and care making sure all of the details lined up and showing how everyone was connected.
Regarding the solution to the murder-- I loved the parlor mystery ending and even though I'm not sure how I feel about some of those twists, I think the author made it work. THE GRADUATION is the darkest book yet in the series with some pretty graphic depictions of self-harm and gore, and a lot of sexual content. More so than I can remember seeing in one of these YA paperbacks for teens. It was shocking, to say the least!
Anyone who digs Point Horror and Z-Fave, and other vintage YA imprints will probably enjoy this trilogy.
This series has been stressing me out in the best possible way and I'm actually having a great time reading it. Unlike most of these YA horror pulps, which tend to be one and done deals, the plot of this one is spread out over a trilogy. I detail the characters in my review of book one and don't feel like getting into all of that again because there are so many of them, but I really liked how Pike developed their characters.
Book one is sort of like a locked-room mystery, except 80% of the book is character building. By the time the murder finally happens, tensions are at an all-time high and you have your pick of suspects. I thought for sure I'd find out whodunnit in book two, but no. There's still one book left in the trilogy, and the answers we seek aren't in this one. There is, however, another attempted murder resulting in a disfiguring accident, and you learn even more clues and character insights that make you question everything you thought you knew about the characters.
I don't want to say too much about THE DANCE because less is definitely more going into these books. They're much edgier than I thought they would be for the time in which they were written, dealing with sex, drugs, and economic inequality in a way that is surprisingly mature for pulps. It's also kind of cool that two of the characters aren't white, although Pike does take the cliche route, making the Black player come from the ghetto and be good at basketball and the Latina character an illegal immigrant.
Overall, though, I have been super impressed with these books. I think they would have scandalized me (in a good way) if I'd read them as a kid. I like that Pike, like Caroline B. Cooney and L.J. Smith, doesn't really pull back the punches in his books. They're suspenseful and sometimes even sensual in a way that a lot of YA books of the time really weren't. It's easy to see why he's a cult favorite. I can't wait to see what happens in the last book. Expect my review for that and the series as a whole soon!
I'm going through some of my old books that I found in storage and deciding what stays and what goes. This book is from the Z-Fave line which seems to be Kensington publishing's attempt to compete with Scholastic's Point Horror line. I haven't read any of the other books in this series so I can't say for sure how well it succeeds, but based on this one, I have to say that it was a pretty solid thriller.
When Duane, Morgan's abusive boyfriend, slaps her for not doing his homework for him, Morgan breaks up with him and declares that she's over men despite her friend Elliott's skepticism. Morgan's ability to hold out lasts approximately a few days before she lands eyes on Neal. Such is the fickle nature of the teenage girl.
At the same time, gifts are appearing on her front porch-- a bottle of her favorite perfume, a cassette of her favorite band, a sexy nightgown in her favorite color. She thinks it's from a secret admirer and at first she's flattered-- but then the gifts start to turn nasty. You know, as things do.
I think I've read this before but so many YA books from this time period revolved around sexually motivated stalkers that it sometimes felt like a sneaky form of birth control ("don't have sex, or you'll get an axe in your head"). The mystery was good. I had a pretty good idea what was going on from the beginning but the author foreshadowed it really well. It also had a ton of really fun dated references, like VHS players, the heroine reading one of Danielle Steel's old novels (Heartbeat), and cars like the Chevrolet Celebrity or the Chevrolet Malibu (I guess the author likes Chevrolets?).
Some of the dated references were less charming, though. There's a reference to something called a "f*g rag", which I looked up and I guess is a derogatory word for a gay magazine. The heroine at one point threatens to put one in her ex's bedroom if he doesn't stop threatening her. It also keeps using the word "pudwhacker," which I'd never heard before, and I guess is a Southern way of saying jerk-off? (The book is set in Kansas.) It's used several times and is kind of surprising to see such words in these YA pulps because in my thoughts they were always tame, but I guess these things just went way over Child Me's head.
The villain, it probably won't surprise you to hear, is a super incel creep, so there's all kinds of abusive language towards women, including numerous uses of the word "bitch."
Overall I liked this mystery a lot and I liked (most) of the dated references. ESPECIALLY the link to the publisher's online chat, which actually invites you to dial in with a modem. I took a picture of that and uploaded it to my Instagram because it was so precious (don't worry, I blurred out the numbers). Would I read this again? Probably not. But I am curious about the other books in the series.
Whoa. This was SO dark. I'm reading through my stockpile of YA horror and I was kind of shocked by how bleak and intense this was. Unlike a lot of other vintage YA horror, which glosses over character development in favor of easy thrills and chills, 80% of this book was about building up all of these characters, getting you to understand their interactions and relationships to each other, which makes the ending even more brutal.
When Mesa School closed, the kids were integrated into Tabb High. To unify everyone, local rich orphans, Polly and Alice, decide to throw a big party in the name of camaraderie. Polly is heavy and boy-crazy but socially awkward and Alice, her sister, is a dreamy artist who, it is hinted, might have psychological problems and an eating disorder.
The other characters are Nick, a young Black man who grew up in a bad part of L.A. and is having difficulty fitting in with his rich white peers; Michael, a nerd who has a crush on one of the pretty new girls and is trying to reconcile his lack of a sex life with that of his very successful player of a friend, Bubba; and Jessica, an ex-cheerleader who is self-aware and self-conscious, all at the same time.
The side characters are Sara, an outspoken girl with an attitude problem and one of Jessica's friends from Mesa; Maria, the daughter of illegal immigrants and Nick's love interest; and Bubba, a really sleazy nerd who has inexplicable success with the ladies and isn't above lies and manipulation to get in their pants. There's also Clark, Alice's creepy and mysterious boyfriend, Clair, the social butterfly of the school and Bubba's love interest, and Bill, the guy Jessica might be into and Michael's rival.
This book was just so well done. I like that it mentioned sex and drugs (not too explicitly) and actually seemed to reflect a modern version of high school and not one of the 50s (the age at which some of these writers likely attended high school themselves-- for example, in this R.L. Stine book I read recently, one of the kids describes a dance as a "hop" LOL). It talks about abortions, illegal immigrations, racism, drug abuse, therapy, and all kinds of other things. As for swearing, it's pretty light on that, although the F-word for gay people is used and one of the racist football assholes keeps referring to Nick, who is Black, as "boy." Neither instance was portrayed as acceptable.
After the murder inevitably happens, the book ends on a cliffhanger of sorts since this is book one in a trilogy. So after all that build-up, you only see the death and not the culprit. I'm really curious to see who dunnit and I loved that this deadly party is described in-text as a locked-room murder (one of my FAVORITE tropes). Thank goodness I have the omnibus edition of this series! I can't wait to read more.
R.L. Stine's books can be hit or miss because he churns them out like butter. You can tell when he's dialing it in and when he's making a more concerted effort. Writing spoiled, borderline-sociopathic girls getting their comeuppance seems to be his strong point. There's Reva from the Silent Night trilogy and this book, THE BOYFRIEND, with Joanna.
Joanna is a rich, snobby New Englander who is basically a living, breathing stereotype. She's dating a boy from the wrong side of the tracks because he looks like Matt Dillon (lol) but she's getting bored of him. Now she's got her eye on Shep, another rich New Englander who comes from the same sort of stock as her and also has a brand new Jaguar.
Instead of straight up breaking up with him, she treats Dex like garbage, which results in a prank... that goes horribly wrong. Fatally wrong, one might say. Dex dies and instead of calling the police, Joanna runs away-- and promptly gets into a car wreck. When she wakes up, she hears the horrible news and her first thought is literally something like, "Yay, now I don't have to break up with him! I'm single again!" What a card.
But then-- Dex comes back.
This is one of Stine's better books. I thought the suspense was great and the writing was a cut above some of his other books. There were so many twists at the end, it kind of made my head spin a little, but ultimately I think I liked it. Joanna was just SO awful... it was kind of a relief not to feel sorry for her and just kick back and go along for the ride. Point Horror books are always way more intense if you actually like the character, which is why the Losing Christina series by Caroline B. Cooney still sends me on a rollercoaster of emotions to this day.
If you like Point Horror books, you'll enjoy this one. It's the perfect read for fall.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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