Published March 2025 via Bloomsbury YA
★★★
As a teenager, CJ's father survived a deadly camp rampage. As an adult, he wasn't so lucky—but that time, CJ survived. And now that CJ is a teenager, there's another wannabe serial killer in town...one who has sent CJ the playbook for what's to come.
I do love me a slasher book, especially if it can keep me up at night. But lord have mercy, I like my slasher hero/ines to come with a bit of brain. The big bad wolf literally—not a spoiler; this happens early—sends CJ a script of what is to come, and what does CJ do with this? Tell the police? Tell any adult at all? Send an anonymous tip in? No. CJ recruits a couple of teenagers (one of whom is absolutely thrilled to be living in a horror story and neither of whom seems bothered that they too might die) to help fail to prevent death after death. (Because this is YA, though, don't worry—they aren't deaths of characters you're asked to care about.)
Spoilers follow:
Eventually—late in the game—an adult notices that CJ knows something and isn't telling. You might think that this adult would, oh, call the police or at least another adult, but instead she decides that the appropriate recruits are 1) her teenage child, 2) her just-barely-teenage other child, and 3) her teenage child's friends, neither of whom she has ever met before. I guess she doesn't mind the possibility of telling their parents that they were brutally murdered because she let them stake out a probable murder scene.
End of spoilers
Anyway. I do enjoy the campiness, and I like CJ's family...most of the time. (See above.) But the big bad wolf is predictable, and this just hit up pretty quickly against the edges of my limited ability to suspend disbelief. (Even without all of the above, how is a there not a single police officer who finds it suspicious that CJ is the one finding body after body?)
Two and a half stars? A fast read, but I did not lose sleep over this book.
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