Christian's Reviews > You're Not Supposed to Die Tonight

When I picked this up, I knew that it would either end up being a shitty horror film that I would rate 2 stars on letterboxd in book format or a fun slasher time perfect for Halloween season. Unfortunately, it was primarily the former.

Let's do the positives first. I'm a huge horror fan, and I appreciated that we are following a primarily non-white cast in a tropey setting, giving it a fresh perspective while retaining all the campy elements of old-school slasher flicks. I was mildly entertained throughout the whole thing, I'd say.

However, the general construction of this novel completely sells the general fun premise of it short. First of all, the characters were super bland. I liked the protagonist Charity well enough, but the entire supporting cast had close to no personality. During most of the conversations where all of them were alive, I would forget who was who multiple times because they all sounded so similar. It didn't help that I was given barely any descriptions of what they looked like, so everyone felt like this empty, replaceable shell.

To be honest, I found the writing to be lacking overall. At first, this read almost like a middle-grade novel with how simplistic and uninspired the writing was, and I can say that I probably won't pick up any other books by this author. It was just all so flat. The biggest letdown was the camp setting. There was absolutely no atmosphere, no creepy vibes, no sense of creeping dread. A lot of the terminology was very confusing, everything was either just called "lodge #1" or "path #2", with the exception of some buildings somehow being called both "main lodge" and "Western lodge" at the same time. No further descriptions of the buildings were supplied to make it easier to distinguish one from the other.

And hell, a big portion of the book doesn't even take place in the camp. It's around 230 pages, and after way too long of a setup section, most of the mystery and horror takes place outside of the camp. Only about the final 40 pages are an actual cat-mouse-game on the camp grounds. And the "enemy" just wasn't scary at all, which was alright I guess, because they often aren't in these films, and I will say that I kind of liked the idea of what the enemy was, but in the end this aspect too was very bland and basic. In total, the plot was way too repetitive. I swear they decided to run to the office building about 5 times, because that's where the phone was. I found some inconsistencies within the implied timeline as well. Lastly, the gore in this was incredibly underwhelming. It took SO long for these people to finally start dying, and not only did most of this happen off the page, but then everything was always described as "pink" in an attempt to make it horrific. Not everything on the inside of the human body is pink.

The epilogue was okay, and some of the final twists I didn't see coming, but to be honest, I wouldn't really recommend this. You can get the same frustrations and annoyances with most mediocre horror films, but those only take about 90 minutes of your life.