The Boy Meets Girl Massacre by Ainslie Hogarth
My rating: 3/5 cats
this is a fun book to supplement any spooktober reading you folks may be doing this year. here are its prominent features which you can sort into your own personal “pro” or “con” columns:
—very quick read
—“found footage” structure in the form of a diary removed from a crime scene, annotated by hollywood peeps
—splattery. soooo splattery
—slow build to the bloody events whose details we know from the very beginning
—unreliable narrator
—jamesian ambiguity but not jamesian writing style (see first —)
these are all in the pro column for me, but you know your own comfort level when it comes to bloodspray (oh, and there’s some animal blood in that spray, FYI), and your own personal needs for resolution and how long it takes to get there. i will say that the author of the diary that makes up the majority of the book and supplies its voice is pretty annoying. but knowing from page one that she’s dead by the end will help with that. and while this book didn’t scare me, since i’m still trying to find a book that can achieve that goal in my life, there are still some very good creepily atmospheric descriptions in here that at least activated my arm-hair alarms. so many dark hallways, so many mysterious dragging noises, so narrow a divide between supernatural and medical explanations. i mean, obviously there’s shades of The Shining here—it’s a hotel with a spooky reputation
and it focuses on the long-term psychological effects of exposure to such a fraught location, but it takes a slightly different path than The Shining, and the immediacy that the diary-format brings to the table is definitely a turn-on.
it’s not the best or the scariest book ever, but i really appreciated the questions that lingered with me, and the way the dough was kneaded throughout. does that analogy make sense to anyone but me? i think i mean that the process of the story’s development was fun to watch as it transitioned through its stages, even if we didn’t get to eat the bread at the end. or know if it turned into bread at all.
great, now i want bread and honey.
no more baking analogies for you, karen!
it’s october! read something spooky!
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