I struggle with how to categorize this one. It's ostensibly about a murder that takes place in an extreme escape-room-type attraction, but it really supposed to be more about the characters involved. It reminds me a lot of the films of Jordan Peele, where, you know, at the end we realize the monster is us and that we're all living in the racial haunted house that is America.

While the characters were kind of interesting, however, the motivation for the murder as it's revealed makes no sense at all, and the ending doesn't really hang together with the big-picture thematic ideas about race and privilege that the author is trying to get across. ( )

I would call this well-written novel an experiment in literary horror that trips over itself a bit in the last act. The story centers around an "extreme" haunted house attraction in Lincoln, Nebraska--the Quigley House--and is set in the late 1990s (the time is important). Contestants vie to make it through the house's cells and win a cash prize while being terrorized and even physically assaulted by the actors. From the outset, we know that something horrific has happened during one of these tours, and there is a trial going on as a result.

The three point-of-view characters all have ties to the house. Kendra is a teenage Black girl who moved to Nebraska with her mother to live with her aunt after her father died. She feels out of place there and gets a job at the Quigley House at the urging of her boyfriend back home, who is a horror fan. Jaidee is a young Thai man attending the University of Nebraska but really stalking his former English teacher, a white American man with whom he is in love. He ends up becoming a contestant at Quigley with his former English teacher as well as his college roommate (and Kendra's cousin), Bryan--don't worry, the book makes sense of this eventually. And Leonard is a white man who works at a Lincoln hotel and befriends the charismatic owner of Quigley House, John Forrester. Besides the house, each of these characters have other things in common: they feel isolated and lack belonging; they latch onto a love interest who likely isn't all that into them; and they make bad choices in the name of "love."

The Quigley house is really a metaphor for the horrorscape of modern American life, especially for people on the outside. Mattson makes this point in many different ways and from different viewpoints. Seeing Jaidee try and fail to become American is painful. Watching Leonard get twisted into a prototype incel is frightening. The scenes in the house itself are both exciting and shocking.

I think it kind of falls down at the end. It gets a bit too heavy-handed, too much on the nose. Maybe Mattson is trying to juggle too many themes at once. But by that time, we've already been through the ride, which I enjoyed. I appreciate it when writers try to do different things in the horror genre and when they use horror to shine a light on the horrors we all live with everyday. ( )

This is a weird one. The plot centers on a house of horrors known as the Quigley House. Different from typical haunted houses the actors are allowed to touch the patrons. The goal is to gather envelopes in a series of rooms to ultimately get a cash prize if you make it the whole way through. The characters are from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds. So, parallel to the somewhat gruesome "house" plot there is an undercurrent of racism, homophobia and pedophilia. If it sounds like a lt, it is, but I liked it. ( )

it felt like two or more novels grafted together, which was unfortunate because a lot of those novels were very interesting to me - i enjoyed kendras perspective, and while jailee was not a likeable character his story was well told. unfortunately, i felt like bryan was never given the depth he deserved. compared to many other characters in this book he was shown to be a patient, kind, and aware person, but we do not get to sit with him and his thoughts for a long time the way we do with other characters. our only time spent with him is in the chaos of the competition at the haunted house. it felt like this lack of a deeper understanding of him mirrored the discussion in the book of the Black character in the shining - a character who represents hope in some way is killed off by the author before they can change the narrative hurtling towards them. in a way that makes me think that maybe this was purposeful. i think that represents a true source of horror but i wish it was clearer! ( )

Wow! This book took me on a great ride! READ IT! If I say more, I'm afraid I will give away too much! ( )