slimepuppy's reviews
121 reviews

This story starts like a typical "I Know What You Did Last Summer" murder mystery with all of its cliches and suspects... and then the first POV shifts happens, and the real fun begins. Even if I expected some of the twists, this book still caught me off guard a couple of times, and I think the final Emily chapter  delivers a brilliant closure - without it, I would have been sorely disappointed, but as it is I think the ending is beautiful, sad and haunting.

The characters are all extremely flawed, but I was still able to relate to their anguish - it definitely helps that all of them feel and sound very young, and that the dialogue is well written and the setting well established.

The only reason I can't give this book a 5 star rating is because the different narrators did sound a little same-y. I think Chelsea and Kennedy were different enough, but Emily was way too similar to both of their voices, and I was craving some change by that point in the book. Emily came across very differently when seen through Kennedy's eyes, and I wish her POV carried more of her earlier portrayal.

Gut wrenching, sad and a beautifully written insight into the British Empire - but also just empires in general - and their wretchedness, their disregard for humanity and the way it justifies its crimes. Some scenes were just... cinematic. There's no other way to describe it.

Also, this story is just insane? Everything was personally out to get those guys from day zero, and they refused to quit at every turn. Let this be a lesson that it's ok to quit! Lest you become David Cheap.

It takes a while to get going, but once it does it's 100% worth it. So charming. So juicy. Austen describes mortification so well, it's almost painful.

I only wish Mr. Collins had gotten shot or something. Oh, well. Off to AO3.

Started this book while in the hospital waiting for my mom to come out of surgery. Undergoing surgery sounded more interesting than anything this book had to say. 

I related to a lot of the author's thoughts in the parts where she talked about struggling with her health, but once she moved on from her personal experiences the book sort of fell apart. The book has such a preachy tone, constantly making shallow statements and then never digging deeper in any subject - the book ended up reading more like self-help (or a really long Twitter thread) than a collection of related essays.

While it is certainly as witty as the first book, this one just kind of stumbles through some of its' conclusions - mainly the De Grey mystery and her character as a whole - wrapping things up with seemingly no thoughts put into it. 

I'm sure some of the things not addressed will probably be tackled in the next book, but I think it was just unnecessary to split things down the middle. It felt underwhelming to spend two books reading about this big, dark mystery of the past, only for it to be solved and then promptly ignored because the main character had to go off on her own. Why the forced hurry? The book could have afforded to be a little longer.

Despite all this, it was still a fun, quick read. The romance wasn't awkward (and sometimes I even found myself wishing for more of it) and the new characters were well developed and interesting, though the setting was somewhat interchangeable with last book's setting. Emily is kind of a bitch a lot, but I'm glad that a FMC gets to the be the awful one for once without being apologetic about all the time - she apologizes when it's really pertinent, and that's enough.

Wendell and the Fae are the best parts of the book, though. I love how the definition of what a Fae is expanding so much; by the third book everything will be Fae. Good!

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.