Title: Reprieve
Author: James Han Mattson
Publisher: William Morrow 2021
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 412
Rating: 2/5 stars
Reading Challenges:
On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps, and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe word, “reprieve,” they’ll win a substantial cash prize—a startling feat accomplished only by one other group in the house’s long history. But before they can complete the challenge, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants.
Those who were present on that fateful night lend their points of view: Kendra Brown, a teenager who’s been uprooted from her childhood home after the sudden loss of her father; Leonard Grandton, a desperate and impressionable hotel manager caught in a series of toxic entanglements; and Jaidee Charoensuk, a gay international student who came to the United States in a besotted search for his former English teacher. As each character’s journey unfurls and overlaps, deceit and misunderstandings fueled by obsession and prejudice are revealed, forcing all to reckon with the ways in which their beliefs and actions contributed to a horrifying catastrophe.
Ooof, this was a major miss for me. I picked it up because people were talking about this great new horror novel. It’s not horror in a traditional sense at all (despite what the summary implies). It is horror in that it delves into the dark recesses of human minds. It’s terrifying, but in a way that I don’t enjoy reading. I very much dislike reading books where everyone is being terrible to each other. There’s not hope in this book. It was thoroughly depressing. Beyond the subject matter and plot, the writing was not great. I was not enjoying spending pages upon pages with these characters establishing backstory (sometimes years before the events in the book) just to spend so little time at the house. It was unbalanced and felt very much like a slog through most of the chapters. Oddly, the backstory chapters are written in a young adult style. I understand that the characters are young adults in those chapters, but you don’t have to write like that in an adult book. Very odd choice that really left me feeling cold about this book.
Next up on the TBR pile:
