“I SURVIVED THE NIGHT AT CAMP MIRROR LAKE”

When we meet Charity, she’s in the process of surviving her third summer at Camp Mirror Lake. Camp Mirror Lake was the location for the 1983 movie, The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. Now it’s the location for a “full-contact terror-simulation experience” based on the movie.

Charity is basically living her best horror life; as the Final Girl, she’s the last one standing every night. Bonus points for her job giving her somewhere other than her home to be all summer.

Charity and her team of seven spend their nights terrorising whoever wants to pay for the privilege. Well, it used to be Charity and her team of seven. Some of the team recently stopped showing up to work.

Luckily, during one of the only times reception was good enough to make a phone call, Charity was able to call in some reinforcements. Bezi is Charity’s girlfriend. She wears her heart on her sleeve but hopefully not literally. She does know she’s just walked into a slasher, doesn’t she?

“Oh, honey. You’re going to die out here, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

Then there’s Paige, who knows all of the scary stories so maybe she’s Randy from Scream. She’s also a reporter, so I guess she’s Gale Weathers as well. Charity is obviously Sidney Prescott.

I matched a few other characters with their Scream equivalents but this is not that franchise. It’s a slasher but then it’s also something else so, while I figured out who the Big Bad was early on, it wasn’t until everything began to unfold that I had any idea what form their monologue would take. While I don’t have any specific unanswered questions about the direction it went, I would have liked the story behind this to have been fleshed out more.

This was a quick, entertaining read. As someone who celebrates every Friday the 13th, this felt like a homage but the characters were trying to survive a horror that wasn’t Jason shaped at all.

I absolutely adored Fernanda Suarez’s cover image. It’s what drew me to the book in the first place and what kept reminding me I needed it in my life.

This is my first book by this author. I don’t expect it to be my last.

“It’s all fun and games until you’re dead.”