When I was a kid, I was all about the Point Horror books. I would scavenge the library for these and check out the max amount at a time, and then come back, return the ones I'd gotten, and immediately check out more (and so on and so forth, until I exhausted the selection). There were many tropes in these books but my favorite was and still is "the deadly party." Oh, we got invitations to this strange creepy mansion owned by this girl who doesn't like us? Cool. A mountain retreat with a sinister couple who like torturing children? Neat-o. A beach getaway with a bunch of red-blooded teens who start lusting for blood? Radical.
You're always painting the town red with Point Horror!
A lot of these books have started to run together in my memories but I actually vaguely remembered THE INVITATION and I thought it would make a good candidate for my rereading project, where I revisit books from my childhood and adolescence that I used to enjoy.
The premise of THE INVITATION is pretty simple. Five outcast teens receive invitations to go to a mansion owned by the most popular girl in their school. The party opens up with a game of musical chairs but bad things happen to the losers. At first, what simply seems mean-spirited quickly seems deadly, as one girl is locked up in a garage with a car, and another is left to panic in the dark. But who would want to hurt them? And why?
The payoff for this one was such a cop-out. There's no real foreshadowing and everything just kind of happens all at once. It felt cheap. I like it when you at least have a shot at picking out the bad guy from the beginning of the book and it's no fun if the author just throws something together. I remember thinking the mansion setting was so cool as a kid, but as an adult, it feels kind of lame. I liked the Dark Shadows reference in the beginning of the book, though. It really slaps a time stamp on it.
Not my favorite Point Horror so far by a long shot. So far, Caroline B. Cooney is the reigning queen.
I'm preparing to unhaul some of my middle grade books for a friend so I've been reading through my collection to see what goes and what stays. I don't actually remember reading this one before so it might be one I bought and forgot about. CAMP FEAR is kind of like Friday the 13th for kids. Rachel is a teen counselor at Camp Silverlake, along with a handful of other teens. It seems like a more adult version of regular camping, but it's cliquish-- especially since it turns out most of the counselors know each other from summer camp as kids.
Pretty soon, however, it turns out that things aren't exactly copacetic. The other kids are hiding something and get cagey when Rachel brings up the past. Then when she puts up some old camp photos on a billboard, they freak out. It's clear they don't like the photo, but not why. Then Rachel learns that something bad happened at the camp years ago that the others would dearly like to forget. But SOMEONE wants them to remember.
This was a fun book. It really is a lot like Friday the 13th but without all the sex and gore. I didn't really figure out who did it until the end. The author was trying to force one of the red herrings too hard, which made me figure that definitely wasn't whodunnit. I don't remember reading a lot of Carol Ellis's Point Horror contributions, but she really isn't bad! I'll have to keep an eye out for more of her books.
I remember Christopher Pike being one of my all-time faves as a kid but this one just wasn't it. It was bland and boring and felt really dialed in compared to books like DIE SOFTLY, which have the benefit of being ridiculously over-the-top, or his awesome vampire series.
Can't say I'd recommend this one. To the donation box it goes!
What if I told you that this book was about cocaine?!
...Totally being serious.
DIE SOFTLY was in a bag of books that was in my garage. I'm currently doing an experiment where I reread some of my old YA books and see how they hold up to my memories of reading them, but I actually have zero recollection of reading this book, ever. Because it is CRAY-CRAY.
Herb is a loser at his school. He has one friend, an overweight girl named Sammie. They both hate the popular kids. One day, Sammie gets an ingenious idea. Rig up a camera and photograph the naked cheerleaders in the locker rooms. Then distribute them to the student body as revenge! Hey, it's the early 90s! This won't be considered a sex crime for YEARS!
Obviously, Herb and his permanent hard-on think this is a great idea.
So Herb does his little camera "trick" and one of the cheerleaders dies mysteriously. Then when he develops the photos, he notices something funny. It looks like he might have captured the moments leading up to the cheerleader's murder. Uh-oh.
I was not prepared for how INSANE this book was going to get. It's got references to sex, child abuse, bondage, and cocaine. I remember the Point Horror novellas being pretty tame, so the fact that this one was so unabashedly crazysauce was kind of a shock. Christopher Pike always wrote darker books but I'm kind of amazed that such things made it into a middle grade book of the early 90s.
The ending was even more fucked up and over the top. I can kind of see why this one is out of print.
Did I really just read this whole book in a single day? Yes. I didn't even mean for it to happen, just, once I started reading, I couldn't stop. BOY PARTS is a book I've had my eye on for a while but I was afraid to read it because so many reviews were saying it was super gory and comparing it to AMERICAN PSYCHO. Now that I've read it for myself, I can say... it is like AMERICAN PSYCHO, but better, because it delves into a lot of amazing social commentary about sexism, society's inability to see women as the perpetrators of violence because of that sexism, "woke" culture, art and how we consume it, and so much more. Fuck Bret Easton Ellis, man. If you're going to read about one unhinged, narcissistic psychopath this year, pick this one.
In the beginning, with its stream of consciousness style of narration and the way it picks apart the disaffected youth culture of young working class British girls, BOY PARTS really reminded me of GREEN GIRL. Irina, the heroine, is a fetish photographer who enjoys taking pictures of men who aren't classically attractive. She poses them in photographs in ways that subvert the male gaze-heavy fetish photographs that show women in peril or pain. Subverting the status quo. Which sounds all right, until you start to see the woman behind the art: is she making a statement or does she just enjoy hurting people? Why does she like horror movies that ape snuff films, and banned foreign movies with lurid rape scenes? Why does she keep seeing people with pieces of glass in their eyes?
This is a weird, trippy, nasty book. There is violence but for the most part, it's pretty tasteful. The author doesn't wallow in it, which I appreciated. I will say that there is a cat death: it's mentioned twice, both times depicted on page. It made me really sad but it wasn't as graphic as what happens to the people in this book, which somehow still didn't gross me out as much as the opening paragraph where the heroine is about to drunkenly regurgitate a sandwich. I liked the slow unraveling of her sanity and the way that she's an unreliable narrator in her own story. I think some people use unreliable narrators as a narrative Get Out of Jail Free card, which-- no, don't do that. But when it's done right, it can add an extra layer to the story, focusing you to squint your eyes and study the plot through a smeary lens.
Irina is a truly chilling character but the people she surrounds herself aren't much better. Which maybe isn't much of a surprise if you ask yourself-- what kind of person would willingly stay in the orbit of a sociopath? The cast of secondary characters is vast and layered, and part of the fun of this book is sticking around and seeing what chaos Irina will wreak in the name of her art next. This was a great book to chase WOMAN, EATING with, and if unhinged female artist characters are the new black, I know what I'll be swathing myself in this season. I can't wait to read Eliza Clark's next book, but I have to say-- the fact that she wrote a character like this slightly terrifies me.
The blurb compares this to The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar. I actually think a better pairing would be The Night Film meets American Gothic. THE LOST VILLAGE is about a documentarian named Alice who wants to create a project revolving around the abandoned mining town, Silvertjarn. But Silvertjarn is different than other ghost towns: things changed mysteriously after the arrival of a charismatic preacher and then all the townsfolk disappeared at once.
Alice goes to Silvertjarn with her crew: Emmy, Robert, Max, and Tone. The town is eerie, the perfect setting for a creepy documentary. But pretty soon, things start to get weird. Mysterious figures watching them in the rain. Equipment going missing. Vehicles blowing up. Disappearances. When one of the crew goes missing, it starts to look like the project might be more dangerous than even Alice ever thought.
THE LOST VILLAGE is a dual timeline mystery. The present tense is narrated by Alice. The past parts are narrated by Alice's great-grandmother, Elsa, who grew up in and lived in the town. This allows for the gradual dissemination of knowledge through the mediums of two unreliable narrators, neither of whom have a complete set of information at their disposal.
It took me a while to get involved in the book. It moved very slowly and at first it seemed like it might be the type of book to have a silly ending. But I stuck with it because I was curious and I'm really glad I did. Elsa's POV was the slowest but ended up being quite chilling. And Alice's POV became even more compelling as she began to question her own sanity and reality. If you enjoy slower-paced mysteries with dual timelines, I think you'll really enjoy THE LOST VILLAGE. Especially if you also like cold Scandinavian settings and the gradual unwinding of dark family secrets.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
I feel like Riley Sager ran with this concept and did it one better with his book, FINAL GIRLS. I get what Hendrix was trying to do here and it's a fascinating premise, but one thing I've noticed about his books is that it's like he can't decide whether he wants to do homage or parody and kind of tries for both, which ends up making the mood of his books very... uh, weird.
Don't get me wrong. I liked his vampire slaying book and his book about old school horror and pulp is probably one of my favorite books-about-books titles to date. But this one was a lot of tell and not show and ended up coming across as kind of ham-fisted. I couldn't get into it.
WHISPER DOWN THE LANE is a psychological horror novel that obviously draws heavy inspiration from the McMartin preschool trial and the "Satanic panic" of the 1980s. It is told in two POVs, one POV from a boy named Sean who lives with his single mother in the 1980s. The other POV is from a jaded art teacher named Richard in the 2010s and his own family. As the book goes on, and the two stories begin to mirror each other, the reader learns how the two connect.
I actually learned a lot about cases like these because I was a psychology major in school and one of the areas I chose to specialize in was cognition. In one portion of my course, we learned a lot about false memories. One of the ways that false memories can be created is by leading questions, which is why police need to be trained in the types of questions they can ask witnesses-- due to the potential of interview contamination. Even the way a question is asked can bias a witness, and as we can see here in this book, small children can be particularly susceptible to those in positions of authorities.
From a research perspective, I think this book was done very well. Anyone who is at all familiar with these cases resulting from the moral panic and mass hysteria is going to recognize the parallels. I also appreciated the author listing all of his sources in the back of the book; it's wonderful that he gave credit where credit is due. (Fewer authors seem to be listing bibliographies these days.) Where this book failed, for me, was from a story-telling perspective. I felt like this author was trying to channel Stephen King, and noticed several of King's tics here-- disembodied quotes and dialogue, insertions of seemingly innocent pop-culture slogans or song lyrics used in a sinister way-- but it kept pulling me out of the narrative because the way it was done felt so cheesy, and it was done so much.
I also... didn't really like or sympathize with any of the characters? Everyone was so awful. I felt sorry for Sean but... what he did was bad. And Richard wasn't great, either. He's so cynical that he makes pulp noir detectives look like Polyannas. And while I can understand why he acts and thinks the way he does given his background, it made it hard to root for him or be invested in his story. There's also a pretty graphic animal death in this book that occurs at just under halfway through (47% by my count?) that I found pretty upsetting. I kept reading, hoping that the ending would somehow redeem the book for me, but it just ended up making everything feel just as bleak and misanthropic and hopeless.
Usually, Quirk books are fun and campy-- kind of like an homage to pulp horror. One of their most famous authors is Grady Hendrix, and THE SOUTHERN BOOK CLUB'S GUIDE TO SLAYING VAMPIRES is about as these books usually get, but the horror in that book felt like dark comic book violence, whereas this, tonally, felt much more grim and desolate. I'm reading another book from them right now called LYCANTHROPY AND OTHER CHRONIC ILLNESSES which is more typical of their brand: light, quirky fiction, often with a bizarre supernatural bent.
I didn't hate this book and I think people who love depressing 80s horror movies will love this. I, however, did not.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
I need somebody smarter than me to read this book and tell me what they think happened because I am so confused. The first half of this book is a brilliant satire of liberal art schools and pretentious art schools via a sort of Stepford Wives medium and I was super into it. The Bunnies, like the Plastics from Mean Girls, were compelling Queen Bee figures and I was interested in their culty vibe.
Then... the book starts getting really weird. Trippy, in the way that some of those experimental late-90s movies could be trippy, like Dark City or Being John Malkovich or eXistenZ. Trippy, in the way that I found myself sitting here and wondering, "What the hell is going on?"
I ended up setting the book aside, half-finished, and I didn't get back into it until today. I skimmed the second half, and it got even weirder. By the time I finished the book, I was even more confused than I was at the first WTF moment in the book, and I'm not really sure what to think about BUNNY or how I feel. It's fitting that it shares a list with CATHERINE HOUSE because it shares many of the same problems. If you liked CATHERINE HOUSE, you'll probably enjoy this.
I would read more from Mona Awad but this one wasn't really a bullseye with me.
I'm not familiar with Cuddles and Rage but apparently they are a husband and wife duo who make these little anthropomorphic dioramas of food and other inanimate entities. I checked out their Instagram page as research before posting my review and the content they post seems consistent with this book. Looking at some of the other reviews for their work, I quickly noticed that some people seemed confused about the audience for this book and others. Even though it looks cartoonish, I would say that the age for this book is probably teen and up as it's pretty disturbing.
BITES OF TERROR reads kind of like a mash-up of Robot Chicken and one of the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Halloween episodes. A cupcake comes to the dilapidated mansion of an evil cake scientist who is in the process of creating something wondrous and terrible, and to pass the time, he tells the cupcake stories ("bites") of horror, ranging from strawberries turning into mold "zombies," to using growing from seedlings as a Pet Sematary-esque allegory for reanimation of the dead, to a story involving marmalade that was right out of something you might see on The Twilight Zone.
I was pleasantly surprised by the stories in this book, which were a cut above some of the other web-to-book cash-ins I've seen as a blogger. The quality of the photographs was excellent but the stories were great too, the perfect blend of twisted and tongue-in-cheek. I'm not surprised that this was published by Quirk Books, as they seem to publish a lot of these sort of "niche" books that end up being so odd and interesting that you find yourself wanting them for the premise alone.
This definitely isn't appropriate for young kids, but adults who like cartoons and teens with a dark sense of humor will probably love this a lot.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
If there is a better month to read Gothic novels than October, I haven't found it yet. When I heard about the premise of THE BITTERWINE OATH and how it revolved around death cults and witches, my internal trash monster went "YAAAAASS." Set in a fictional town in Texas, BITTERWINE OATH is about a teenage girl named Nat who is the descendant of a woman named Malachi who is potentially responsible for two separate sets of murders many, many years ago.
I wanted to like this more than I did. It's a very slow book and takes a while to get moving. Once it does, it ended up going in a direction I wasn't expecting. In some ways, it reminds me of the Blue Is for Nightmares series that I devoured as a child, only with less magic and mystery. I did like the twist, but I don't think the atmosphere or the narrator were enough to really carry it off. The book feels overwritten, with way too many unnecessary adjectives bogging down the narrative and making it feel clunky, and Nat just isn't a very convincing teen to me. The way her narration is written, it feels kind of like one of those cozy mysteries that's geared towards old ladies.
I think some people are really going to like this book a lot, but it didn't really work for me. I ended up skimming pretty heavily, especially in the second half. Also, this book has some passages about death, murder, self-harm, and a couple other things, but nothing I saw seemed particularly graphic. The violence is what you would expect to see in a 90s PG-13 horror movie.
Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review!
Even though this was originally marketed as a YA title, I think this book will appeal to adults who enjoyed books such as A DOWRY OF BLOOD. It's written in the same lush, gothic style, and has a story driven by the development of the characters it contains rather than any real semblance of plot. Erzebet Bizecka is an imaginary stand-in for Elizabeth Bathory, although the author takes a lot of liberties with her character-- in this book, Erzebet doesn't marry or give birth and I believe, historically, Bathory did.
THE BLOOD CONFESSION is a slow tale of corruption and madness. Erzebet grows up neglected by both her parents: her mother is vain and mad, her father is a corrupt and indifferent philanderer. While roaming around the castle, Erzebet encounters strange and supernatural happenings, and witnesses an innate cruelty in the land and its people that warps her ideas of youth, womanhood, and spiritualism. When she inevitably starts attacking the peasant girls of Hungary, it feels almost inevitable.
As a gothic tale, I think this is a decent story. It certainly would have appealed to my 2000s-era goth girly aesthetics, when I spent most of my days camped out on Quizilla reading Anne Rice fanfics riddled with frilly lace shirts and pick-me girls. I'm actually surprised it hasn't seen a revival, since Erzebet's sapphic inclinations, the 16th century murder shenanigans, and all of that ornate writing, really fit the trend for what I've seen trickling out of BookTok. Plus, there's a hot supernatural dude named Sinestra who might or might not be in her imagination. The only reason I'm not giving it a higher rating is because it takes a while to get moving and then it takes a while to end.
P.S. She spends way too much time fantasizing about a statue she calls "Athenus," because she thinks it's a male version of Athena. When she's not lusting after the statue, she's pining over her straight best friend, and thinking of ways to DIY blood facials and blood cosmetics. The wtfery in this book is honestly worth a read alone. How did the author come up with this stuff? I LOVE HER.
This is some of the creepiest stuff I've ever read. It reads kind of like a mash-up between Silent Hill and Narnia. Imagine finding a hole in your place of residence, but instead of leading you to a delightful and whimsical journey of portal fantasy adventure, it plunges you into a foggy nightmare land where islands with doors spread out as far as the eye can see-- like the lighthouses in Bioshock: Infinite-- and something disturbing and unseen lurks in the rasping shadows of willow trees.
So here's the thing. I am a HUGE horror wuss. My siblings both love horror movies-- I can't stand them. I'm a romance reader at heart, okay? I just want everyone and the dog (or cat) to survive at the end and get married and maybe make babies but also not because I'm all about choice. And horror movies-- and books-- have a nasty habit of unaliving the characters it makes me care about. That stinks.
Not T. Kingfisher, though. I've read three of her horror stories at this point and so far, all the animal sidekicks have survived. (Not only that, but they also defend their humans like the very good girls and boys that they are.) Sometimes there's a bit of a romance, sometimes a fromance (friend romance, get it?). But the main character is always a charming blend of cynical and doofy, and there's always some lighthearted humor to take the load off the spine-melting terror. And you know what? I LOVE THAT.
I don't know why I keep coming back to the horror genre when it stresses me out so much. I think it's because I love the VIBES of horror. I grew up with Goosebumps and Scholastic's Point Horror line, so I like the feeling of being scared, I just want an HEA, too. But T. Kingfisher's books deliver on the vibes while (usually) delivering HEAs for those characters you care about. THE HOLLOW PLACES sure pushed all of my limits, though. I don't want to say too much and spoil things, but there was some serious body horror in here and she knew exactly how much to withhold to maintain that cloying sense of uncertainty and terror. Do NOT read this alone in the dark or you will be very sorry.
I'm giving this five stars because I honestly think this is the best and most developed storyline she's come up with after her Bluebeard retelling, THE SEVENTH BRIDE. Her other horror novel, THE TWISTED ONES, was just as creepy, but I felt like the payoff wasn't quite as good. THE HOLLOW PLACES delivered in a way that TWO did not, and man oh man, did I want to return to sender. Instead, I'm keeping this on my Kindle because I think the reread potential is high and I want to have it on hand as a reference of what good horror looks like, in case I ever decide to write horror myself.
While reading this book, I was like, "Why does this author's name sound so familiar?" And then I realized he was the author of BLACK HOLE SUN, which I think I received an ARC of back when it first came out. I remember thinking the teen speak in that book was really weird, but since it took place on a Mars colony or something like that, I was like, well whatever, it's the ~future~ and rolled with it despite being skeptical. But no, actually, it seems like it's just the author, because this book was also super cringe with its slang-- or what the author thought was slang-- with gems like "bitchlette" and using "zucchini" as an insult.
I was actually in a weird mood, so horror felt like a great choice, but this book is SO BORING and it's 500+ pages??? Why is it so long? NOTHING IS HAPPENING. There's a dude who possesses bodies with lightning and an evil undead witch and a girl with super powers, so really this should be the opposite of boring. I went to Goodreads to write my review and when I saw the low average rating, I felt SO VALIDATED. Apparently I'm not the only one who thought the writing was ridic and the pacing was off. Thank you, Goodreadians, for making me feel better about my choices.
Jennifer Hillier might be one of my new favorite thriller authors. I think this is the third book I've read of hers at this point, and they've all been SO GOOD. I've been wanting to read CREEP for a while because I like the Radiohead song and it would be the perfect soundtrack for some creepy erotic thriller like this one. I'm happy to say that Ms. Hillier totally does it justice.
Sheila Tao is a distinguished professor of psychology. She's engaged to be married to a rich banker who's an ex-football player and she's well respected in her career. She's also got a sex addiction and she's been having an affair with her teaching assistant, Ethan Wolfe. But not anymore. She's decided to break things off. But Ethan doesn't take kindly to that. In fact, he's decided that if he can't have Sheila, nobody can.
This was just so good. The pacing was excellent and the author kept up the tension for the whole book. I found myself gripping my computer, desperately clicking to the next page, wanting to find out what happened next. I usually read romances, so with those, 99% of the time, you know you're going to get a happy ending. But with thrillers, it could go either way. There are stakes. I desperately wanted to find out what was going to happen next, and I'm happy to report that things didn't always go the way I thought they would. There were more than a few moments that made me gasp.
At first, I didn't really dig Morris as a love interest, but as we learned more about him, we could see why Sheila decided to marry an older guy who was kind of a drawling teddy bear. His devotion to her, and the way that he overcame his own personal struggles, ended up making him really endearing. In a way, this almost feels like a critique against women who date the hot, noble young studs, where the villain is always a tubby older guy who lusts after the hero. Ethan has the arrogance of youth with the guile of a sociopath, which ends up making him a really terrifying villain.
If you enjoy erotic thrillers, I think you'd enjoy this one. It's smart and snappy and absolutely chock-full of suspense. My only critique is that some of the multi POVs started to feel like thriller towards the end and the author totally sequel-baited the heck out of that ending. Luckily, I own the sequel or I'd be mad. ;)
I was tearing through these Point Horror releases for a while until I turned to cleaning out the books I'd bought for my Kindle. This one just sat half-finished, gathering dust, until I decided to get on with things for Mystery & Thriller week, because timing is everything.
Diane Hoh was one of my favorite authors when I was a kid and even indirectly inspired some of my own work, along with D.E. Athkins and Christopher Pike. I liked that her stories were edgy and didn't talk down to her audience the way R.L. Stine's sometimes did, and the fact that she had a series set in university made them seem extra "adult" and edgy, considering that the Point Horror novels are all mostly middle grade Scholastic imprints.
The only book in this series I actually read as a kid was THE SILENT SCREAM, which is a typical murder mystery with a supernatural twist. I gave it four stars rounded up due to nostalgic value and because the mystery is really well done and genuinely creepy. I was excited to read further on in the series as an adult as I feel that they hold up reasonably well in terms of quality.
In DEADLY ATTRACTION, we return to Salem University. Jessica and Ian reappear from the first book, but the main character in this story is Jessica's friend, Hailey. Hailey and her roommate, Nell, are just nice ordinary girls having fun eating out with their friends, when they see one of the hot shot jocks named Robert Q putting the moves on a townie waitress named Darlene while he's on the rebound from his rich ex. Hailey feels sorry for Darlene and tries to be extra nice to her because of the way Robert's crowd slut-shames her, and she and Nell even try to give her a fancy makeover.
But unfortunately, things pan out exactly as Hailey feared. Robert dumps Darlene like yesterday's news, and Darlene gets very, very angry. Understandably so, Hailey thinks... until weird things start happening. Like her and Nell's dorm room being trashed, a car being destroyed... and then, pretty soon... actual deaths. Just how upset is Darlene with Robert Q? And is Hailey's own life in danger?
Unlike SILENT SCREAM, this book has no supernatural elements. And unlike SILENT SCREAM, it doesn't seem to be plotted out as well. SILENT had all these really great clues but DEADLY felt much more disorganized. I felt like there were way too many red herrings and the book spent too much time on things that weren't really focal to the plot. It was a much more uneven book in terms of quality and I didn't really like Hailey as much as I liked Jessica in the first book.
The series is now charmingly dated with its talk of typewriters and lack of cell phones, but the teenagers still act like teenagers, even if it's a "golly gee" hamburgers and sodapop brand of teenager that's more typical of small towns in the midwest. I found it amusing but I'm not sure I want to read further on in the series. I feel like this probably should have been capped at the first book.
A while ago, I was doing a fun challenge where I was snapping up all the republished 80s and 90s YA and middle grade novels I could find on KU (there are a surprising amount of them) and reviewing all of the ones that piqued my fancy. Many of them were Point Horror, since those books, along with manga, were probably the biggest influence on my as an author (which you will probably immediately recognize if you're familiar with my work-- pulp horror meets OTT K-dramatics).
DEADLY STRANGER was actually really surprising in a fun way for several reasons. First, it's edgier than I was expecting for a middle grade title published in the early 90s, with plenty of allusions to sexual content, some pretty graphic violence, and casual mentions of drinking. Also, the two heroines are literally sneaking away from their parents to go on a ski trip without telling anyone, so there's that.
Shenanigans ensue when they pick up a hot guy who looks like a movie star from his totaled car. Only-- oops, it turns out he's a rapey bad man and he whips out a gun and pulls the ol' "now drive," so they're stuck with him and whatever his sinister plans are. And they are SINISTER.
Because I was a little trash can before I grew up and became a big, mature dumpster, I could totally see young me writing fanfic about the hot kidnapper guy because HOW DO YOU THINK I GOT STARTED ON THIS PATH TO TRASHDOM???? Hot guys = no questions asked. God, I was dumb. I mean, I still am, but at least now I know it. But the fact that he is hot adds a nice bit of tension to all of the gross horror that is the villain of this book WHO, I might add, is one of the most terrifying Point Horror villains that I have encountered in ages. Bravo.
Also, the two girls, Kelly and Lauren, are both very smart. Lauren's the pretty one and Kelly's the cynical DUFF, but they're actually REALLY ingenious in how they try to outsmart the killer. The fact that both of these realistic teenage characters were written by an older man just makes me really happy, because we often see examples of dudes writing young women badly-- here is an example of it being done well. The note in the ceiling was ingenious. Also the ending? *chef's kiss* You just know that Kelly is going to be the last girl standing in a horror movie. She's that fucking smart.
I liked this a lot and the only reason it isn't getting a higher rating is because the beginning took a while to get moving and the ending began to drag. Good stuff.
This is the final book in the Losing Christina trilogy. The first book is THE FOG, the second book is THE SNOW, and the third book is THE FIRE. I read all of these in middle school; my school library had a little wooden bookshelf in the corner filled with Point Horror novels and other YA pulp, and I can't tell you how many times I went over to that corner and availed myself of the latest trash.
I still remember the first time I read THE FIRE. It was nearing summer and hot. I was a shy thirteen-year-old, about to start my first year of high school. I really admired Christina's bravery and how she stood up against all the bullies who were gaslighting her and trying to bring her down. She was such a romantic figure, and in between first loves and her coming-of-age, she had to fight against the sadistic and evil Shevvingtons: adults who got pleasure out of emotionally abusing children to the point that they "broke."
THE FIRE is probably the weakest book in the trilogy. Having read them all back to back, I would say that THE FOG is the strongest. The writing is lyrical and gorgeous and it features some truly unique metaphors and symbolism. THE SNOW is also quite good-- but THE FIRE falls back on the symbolism of previous books, to the point where it begins to feel a little repetitive. The advantage to this is that you can go right into THE FIRE, as I did as a kid, without reading the previous books.
In THE FIRE, the Shevvingtons have turned their focus on Christina. She was always their victim, but in THE FOG and THE SNOW, they had their eye on other girls. Now they're planning on leaving, and starting their evil anew in another city, but before they go, they want Christina to suffer as she never has before. The stakes have never been higher, and as Christina finds herself in rooms splashed with gasoline and carrying purses filled with matchbooks, she begins to realize that her end is not going to be one of ice, but one of fire.
I honestly really enjoyed rereading this trilogy. I'm revisiting a lot of my old favorites and some of them definitely don't hold up (*stares at R.L. Stine*). Cooney's work does, though, and I think these books in particular would make an excellent mini-series like Flowers in the Attic. They also seriously need to be rereleased with new and pretty covers, because I think she's a heroine to rival Katniss Everdeen in terms of sheer number of shit that gets thrown at her over the course of these books. In THE FIRE, she's broken down and getting tired, but I never stopped rooting for her. Not once.
I'm going to start Cooney's Vampire trilogy next and after being pleasantly delighted by the Christina trilogy, my hopes are very high regarding the rest of her work!
Just as many bodice ripper authors ended up publishing smutty versions of the Gothic and Regency romances they read as girls, all of my published books are basically smutty versions of the YA pulp I read growing up. Nightmare Hall, as well as the other Point Horror novels, are a huge part of the inspiration behind my Horroscape series, with each book highlighting a YA horror/thriller trope I loved (can you guess which ones? lol).
I remember reading THE SILENT SCREAM when I was a kid and thinking that I was reading some really good shit because this is one of the few books that actually had college-age characters instead of teen or middle grade ones, so it gave the books a really "mature" feeling that made them feel extra edgy.
In this book, a girl named Jess is starting her first year at college. She's living off-campus in a place called Nightingale Hall along with a bunch of other coeds: artistic Milo, low-key Ian, tightly-strung Cathy, athlete Linda, and the repair guy, Trucker.
Right away, you know this isn't going to be a chill year. The book opens with a pretty graphic description of the house mother finding out that one of her female residents hung herself. Then Jess finds out that she actually got the dead girl's room and weird things start happening. Objects turning up missing or destroyed, spooky letters, and all kinds of unexplainable creepiness.
And the question: Did Giselle, the dead girl, really take her own life?
Part of the fun of these vintage YA is the dated pop culture references. I loved seeing Tom Selleck and Kim Basinger referred to as sex symbols in this book. Also, the students at this school use typewriters and have to go to the school computer lab if they want to use a computer. The story also held up pretty well. I knew who the bad person was from the beginning, which took out some of the fun of trying to figure out whodunnit, but the mystery was well crafted and well written.
Looking forward to reading the rest of the series! I only ever read the first book!
I have this project I do where I look up vintage YA pulps from the 80s and 90s and review them! Some of them are rereads from my childhood but some of them are new to me. SUMMER LIGHTNING by Wendy Corsi Staub is new to me. It looks like she made a switch to writing thrillers for adults but she used to write books for kids. This is one of those, a Harper Prism title about ghosts and doomed love.
Set in Maine, our heroine is a girl named Melissa Loring, a Jane Everygirl who wants to be a writer when she grows up. When we meet her, it's her seventeenth birthday and she's just been given a computer as a birthday gift so she can hack out her books on there instead of a typewriter. She and her family live in an old Victorian house and her bedroom is in the turret room and if you think that's ripe for horrific ghostly happenings, you'd be right. It is.
As soon as she turns the computer on, she sees a weird message. She also has blackouts where she hears voices and strange music. Pretty soon, she starts to think that she's seeing a strange boy. A boy who makes her double-think her attraction to her long-term boyfriend, Tripp.
The set-up for this book is really good and I think it will appeal to any fans of Caroline B. Cooney, as there's some really lush Gothic imagery that's almost lyrical. And for a YA book, it's surprisingly sensual. I guess this is Harper and not Scholastic's Point Horror, so maybe that's why it talks about going all the way and has some pretty intense kissing scenes. Maybe Harper decided to skate the prurient edge a little more with their YA thrillers. I don't know, but I kind of liked it. It made me feel like I was watching one of those so-cheesy-it's-good 80s horror movies.
There are some pretty dated references in here-- music, pop culture, Nancy Reagan-- but rather than dating the book, they end up being charming and kind of sweet. The computer stuff also seemed pretty legit. Like the person who wrote the book actually knew a thing or two about technology.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed with this little book. It got damn creepy at the end.
Nenia ✨ I yeet my books back and forth ✨
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