This was a 4.5/5 stars book until the very last two chapters. Like many horror movies before it, this book lasted longer than it should have. Up until the last chapter, this was a delightful read, an intriguing mystery filled with dread and so much sadness. The Thin Kid and that classroom are going to stick with me for a while - I'll be hoping that the ending doesn't!

I like the script within the book, I like the back and forth between the timeline, I even liked Karson's drawn out movie death scene. Karson's movie scenes in general were eery and disturbing and very fun to picture in a cinematic form. The group dynamics were fun, I liked the characters and I liked wondering about their past, what was truth and what was fiction, why they acted the way they did. I think it's fun that we don't really learn why Karson is the way that he is, we only know what the narrator does.

The book loses a bit of its momentum a little over the halfway mark, but it's nothing truly terrible, at least not until the Cleo reveal and the closing chapter. We spend the entire book skirting around what happened to Cleo and how it broke the main character so thoroughly that he can never escape that day and those weeks spent working on the film - and then the reveal happens, and it's well written, sure, but we get no follow up. We don't get to hear about Cleo's family and the lawsuit, we don't get to hear about Providence's reaction to its homegrown tragedy, we don't even know what sort of sentence the narrator and Valentina got in the trial! It was like Paul couldn't wait to wrap up the book, which is a pity considering that the build up was great.

And then the last chapter, an epilogue of sorts, which suffers from the exact opposite problem - it goes on for too long, discloses too much information which we didn't need to know. We could have left off with the narrator implying half the stuff that happens in that last chapter, and it would have been creepy and effective, and it would even tie up with the ending of the titular Horror Movie, which was abrupt, unique and weird. Alas, we get a really drawn out sequence of events where the narrator becomes utterly insufferable and thing happen. And then things keep happening for however many pages that was.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Paul Tremblay's script for 'Horror Movie' is better than the book Horror Movie. Still had a great time, though.