You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight

SO first of all I will say that this book did genuinely have me scared at points. For the good middle half of the book I had to play silly youtube videos in the background to keep me calm because I made the wise decision to read this at night. It does do a good job of building dread and having you on the edge of your seat for the middle part.

The rest of it...was pretty lacking.

My first issue was the pacing. This book is 15 chapters and shy of 300 pages and as a consequence pretty much everything feels a bit underdeveloped. Things didn't even start happening until chapter 7, which is halfway through the book. The first half of the book felt like the first ten minutes in an actual horror movie but even more stretched out. It still kept me engaged, because the premise of working at terror experience was interesting to read about if nothing else, but the horror aspect definitely should've kicked in earlier. 

The pacing and short length of the book also ties in with the character development. I don't feel like we spent enough time with any of these characters to care if or when they die; we got two or three details about them and then they just went into the thick of it. The only one who escaped this treatment was Charity, for obvious reasons as the MC.

The rest of my gripes are spoilers:

Kyle's betrayal was underwhelming because, while I could see one or two moments where he was sus looking back, the book like I said just wasn't long enough to build up to it and have it be satisfactory. We needed more screen time with him, more hints to the fact that he's hiding something, just MORE of everything. Doubly so with his grandparents. His grandma was literally only “crazy old evil lady” and his grandfather got ONE appearance at the end when he was revealed and then his big villain monologue and that was it. It just fell really flat for me.

And being brutally honest, I do not like that the big plot twist was a super rich secret society. I feel like that storyline is tired and never done satisfactorily. It also pretty much wiped out all the fear and tension that had built up in me beforehand. When I thought there was a killer at the camp I was on the edge of my seat. When I thought there was some sort of supernatural owl creature killing them I was freaked out and looking over my shoulder. Finding out that the “big bad” was just a bunch of rich cultists doing blood sacrifice to get more rich? Boring. Also not what this book was advertised as. I was expecting a slasher that would be rife with confusion and misdirection because it was happening on the set of a terror simulation. I wanted a killer that used the environment against the employees so they were questioning things up until the very end and the gradual sense of terror in the survivors that this was REAL and not a prank or a joke. Instead, we got rich people in robes.

The smallest of props for foiling the final girl narrative by killing Charity, and then the props are swiftly rescinded when Bezi uses the Owl Society powers to resurrect her. Oh well.

Overall this wasn't a BAD book, I've read worse, but this just very much wasn't what I wanted.