Review of Resthaven, by Eric Thern: Press X To Not Die BECAUSE YOUR PARENTS ARE DEAD
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1K.t.Katzmann
You know that famous panel of Batman slapping Robin, screaming "MY PARENTS ARE DEEEAD!!!"? That scene happens at least three times in this book.
For transparency, I got a free copy of this for review purposes.
A group of girls head to an abandoned mental institution to entertain a horrible person with a scavenger hunt. Hijinks ensue, and I chomp at the bit for one of them to get knocked off. Then the lack of profanity tells me I'm reading YA, and I realize that the genre's survival rates are inordinately high.
Pity that. Let's run down the characters.
There's Anna. Oh, Anna.
Anna is one of the most platonically perfect creations of the horror genre. She exists to be Wrong. Not just wrong in general, but Wrong on the cosmic scale of entities like the Silver Surfer. Whatever conflict or choice is in front of our heroes, Anna is Wrong. If new evidence suddenly reverses everyone's understanding of the situation, Anna will instantly flip her opinion to be just as immediately Wrong as she was five minutes ago.
Honestly, I was hoping Anna would be incapacitated all throughout the novel.
Who know who I liked? Wren, the quiet, wry girl with the insane memory and weird facts bobbing around her head.
Guess who gets messed up badly enough that they can't talk halfway through the book? Not Anna.
We also have Jaime, the perfect Mean Girls clone with wonderfully hateful dialogue who unfortunately buggers off for the vast majority of the novel.
As to our our hero, I honestly can't remember anything specific to her personality. Still, that's a common YA trope to give identification to the reader, so I can't get too down on it.
So how does the novel read? Well, do you know what a Quicktime event is? If you're not a video gamer, QTEs are moments in video games where they play a movie clip, and somewhere in the middle you have to rapidly hit buttons to avoid horrible death.
Now that gets annoying during gaming. Here, where we're inside the protagonist's head, constant life-or-death choices are strung along at a frenetic enough pace that I stayed involved and interested. Duck that! Jump this! Run! It's angry! EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE! It works.
And, in-between every few "stages," a new member of the supporting cast all but screams at our hero "MY PARENTS ARE DEAD."
The antagonist in the book (which I'll keep mum about) are logical characters with reasonable motivations and a tangible sense of threat towards our heroes, so points on that.
The ending is one of those that Cracked magazine would include in an article about Things That Are Much Darker When You Think About Them.
If I was an early teen, this would probably be an edge-on-my-seat ride the whole way through. For the appropriate YA crowd, I'd give it an extra star. As an introduction to slasher tropes for the middle school set, it's not bad. It'd make a good PG-13 thriller, I think.
For transparency, I got a free copy of this for review purposes.
A group of girls head to an abandoned mental institution to entertain a horrible person with a scavenger hunt. Hijinks ensue, and I chomp at the bit for one of them to get knocked off. Then the lack of profanity tells me I'm reading YA, and I realize that the genre's survival rates are inordinately high.
Pity that. Let's run down the characters.
There's Anna. Oh, Anna.
Anna is one of the most platonically perfect creations of the horror genre. She exists to be Wrong. Not just wrong in general, but Wrong on the cosmic scale of entities like the Silver Surfer. Whatever conflict or choice is in front of our heroes, Anna is Wrong. If new evidence suddenly reverses everyone's understanding of the situation, Anna will instantly flip her opinion to be just as immediately Wrong as she was five minutes ago.
Honestly, I was hoping Anna would be incapacitated all throughout the novel.
Who know who I liked? Wren, the quiet, wry girl with the insane memory and weird facts bobbing around her head.
Guess who gets messed up badly enough that they can't talk halfway through the book? Not Anna.
We also have Jaime, the perfect Mean Girls clone with wonderfully hateful dialogue who unfortunately buggers off for the vast majority of the novel.
As to our our hero, I honestly can't remember anything specific to her personality. Still, that's a common YA trope to give identification to the reader, so I can't get too down on it.
So how does the novel read? Well, do you know what a Quicktime event is? If you're not a video gamer, QTEs are moments in video games where they play a movie clip, and somewhere in the middle you have to rapidly hit buttons to avoid horrible death.
Now that gets annoying during gaming. Here, where we're inside the protagonist's head, constant life-or-death choices are strung along at a frenetic enough pace that I stayed involved and interested. Duck that! Jump this! Run! It's angry! EVERYTHING'S ON FIRE! It works.
And, in-between every few "stages," a new member of the supporting cast all but screams at our hero "MY PARENTS ARE DEAD."
The antagonist in the book (which I'll keep mum about) are logical characters with reasonable motivations and a tangible sense of threat towards our heroes, so points on that.
The ending is one of those that Cracked magazine would include in an article about Things That Are Much Darker When You Think About Them.
If I was an early teen, this would probably be an edge-on-my-seat ride the whole way through. For the appropriate YA crowd, I'd give it an extra star. As an introduction to slasher tropes for the middle school set, it's not bad. It'd make a good PG-13 thriller, I think.
