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Book Review: Shockadelica by Jon O’ Bergh

Shockadelica by Jon O’Bergh

Bookbaby, 2021

ISBN: 9781098372415

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

Shockadelica is a suspense/horror ghost story that uses the tried and true tools of an old apartment building with mysterious noises in the night. The premise has worked for many authors over the years, but Shockadelica never quite gets the story off the ground floor. It’s an extremely dialogue-heavy story, and it’s difficult to keep the reader’s interest through the entire 252 pages.

Drag queen Kendall and his buddy Jenna start hearing unexplainable noises in their apartment building, and they soon learn that their neighbors do as well. Feeling that an actual haunting would be great material for their “all things horror” weekly podcast, Kendall and Jenna investigate, and learn that the building has a sinister history. The rest is a mystery as they try to find the source of the noises in the building, and whether it is a true haunt, or human nature with an evil purpose.

It’s a decent premise, just very slow moving. The first 130 pages consist almost entirely of Kendall and Jenna interviewing the building’s other inhabitants to learn what they may have seen or heard. The dialogue is straightforward, without much injection of the characters’ personalities. Hearing about the “hauntings” secondhand through dialogue with the other residents hurts the story’s excitement level. Describing the incidents as they actually happen from a narrative point of view would have helped; the few times the hauntings are narrated by the author are pretty good, and doing it more would have helped a great deal. The story doesn’t start building real interest until around page 186. The payoff at the end of the book is decent and there is a nice touch of Irish folk legend involved, it’s just questionable if readers will make it that far.

As for the characters, the secondary ones help the story more than the primary ones. Kendall and Jenna are uninspiring characters; outside of talking about dresses, they don’t do much and generate minimal interest or sympathy. Fleshing them out more would have helped. The secondary characters are eclectic and have a little more life. Vince, the goth/metal musician, is fun, and Rooney is probably the best. She makes her living doing bogus written and video reviews for products she’s never used, and her adventures between the building walls trying to scare her annoying neighbor add some much-needed flair. It’s too bad the main characters weren’t as entertaining.

Shockadelica may appeal to some readers who like stories with a lot of exposition, but most readers will probably want to skip this one.

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on September 6, 2021 by Kirsten, Reply

Book Review: The Between by Ryan Leslie

The Between by Ryan Leslie

Parliament House, 2021

ISBN: 9798741008720

Availability: Paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook ( Bookshop.org | Amazon.com )

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…and what you’ll find in this book is a wildly original story that’s also a homage to the 80’s computer games, when text-based ASCII games like ZORK were all the rage. Combining adventure, horror, mystery, and a touch of nerdiness, The Between is one of the year’s best so far.

Mild-mannered health care executive Paul Prentice discovers a large iron door set in the ground while digging in his Texas backyard. He and his carefree, wisecrack-a-minute buddy Jay wrestle open the door and descend the ladder underneath. They find themselves in a maze of identical rooms, which eventually leads to other worlds of existence containing things like hellhounds of ash, killer robots made of scrap metal, and a vengeful god, Kosmaro, who imprisons souls. Jay and Paul later learn that the world they entered is based on The Between, an old text-based computer game. They try to escape, but eventually have to decide…do they want to escape?

The Between is a fast paced read, with a high level of depth and creativity. With multiple different world levels and all of them having different entrances and exits, there’s no shortage of adventure for Jay and Paul. The book does a good job tying back into the whole “computer game” theme; if you used to play those games, you may see where some of the inspiration for the worlds and characters in the book came from. What made text-based games fun was that they allowed you to become another individual entirely, and The Between does a good job inserting that theme into the writing. Many who enter The Between take on actual roles that exist in the computer game, and they keep the role until they escape, or are killed. This allows for intriguing personality shifts within the characters, such as the “failure in life,” Jay, transforming into a murderous assassin, the stelisto. The story occasionally flips back to Texas, providing a nice contrast to the insanity of The Between. It’s a multi-layered story, and a true original.

A good setting is nothing without good characters, and in addition to Paul and Jay, the other players in The Between do a good job driving the story and keeping it focused. The two female leads, star athlete Supriya, and the cold-hearted former ballet queen Corienne, provide good counterparts for Paul and Jay, and there’s enough backstory to fill out the characters and allow the reader to feel a connection to them. Jay is particularly memorable; his “no worries” attitude helps give the story a dash of humor at times that helps lighten the mood. It’s a wild ride from beginning to end, and one that readers won’t want to miss. Highly recommended.

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Reviewed by Murray Samuelson

Posted on September 3, 2021 by Kirsten, Reply

Booklist: Final Girls

Wow, final girls have really had a great summer! July saw the release of The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix (reviewed here), and with the very end of August, I see Stephen Graham Jones’ newest book, My Heart Is A Chainsaw, is being released. I have not had the opportunity to read that yet, but I highly recommend The Final Girls Support Group (on a side note, my daughter was delighted that the characters were getting therapy).

The final girl is the survivor who takes down the monster in slasher movies. When fiction touches on her, it’s usually in a meta sort of way. Here are a couple of titles to try out if you are in the mood for a tale about final girls.

Final Girls by Riley Sager follows Quincy Carpenter. the lone survivor of a massacre at a cabin in the woods ten years earlier. Quincy, along with two other girls, Lisa and Sam, who survived slasher-style massacres, were labeled “Final Girls” by the media. She has done her best to move on, finding a boyfriend and starting a baking blog, but things start to fall apart when Lisa apparently dies from suicide, leaving a message on Quincy’s voicemail. Then Sam, who has been off the grid for years, appears at Quincy’s door and Quincy’s carefully constructed life starts to fall apart. The twist in this story was not what I expected it to be. Sager does a great job of deconstructing the final girl trope and this was a very difficult book to put down.

Final Girls by Mira Grant introduces Esther Hoffman, a journalist determined to debunk proprietary virtual reality technology that situates participants in horror movie scenarios to force them to face their worst fears. The scientist in charge, Dr. Jennifer Webb, challenges Esther to try it out with her. Events out of their control result in the two of them being trapped in the virtual reality scenario together, with disturbing results.

Final Girl Pocket Manga vol. 1 by David Hutchison drops four girls in a seemingly abandoned, isolated town, where they are stalked by its residents, and must escape their nightmare situation. Only one of them can be the final girl, though… Readers voted for their choice of final girl, and a bloody, full color climax reveals the survivor.

The Last Final Girl is also by Stephen Graham Jones. Taking a . chance with an experimental format, he has written it in a screenplay format, following the structure of a slasher movie. His love of the genre is clear, with many references to existing movies and “in-jokes”. The structure and the dependence of the audience’s understanding of the text on comprehension mean this will appeal to a very niche audience, but that audience will love it. Graham has also written an amazing final girl in his last novel, The Only Good Indians.

The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky starts us out with a final girl– Rachel Chavez, who was attacked in her home and survived. Rachel is a scholarship student at a fancy private school who starts out with no friends, until she discovers a secret club of horror lovers, The Mary Shelley Society, who create “fear tests”, horror scenarios that they try out on friends, classmates, and family. There’s no way this could end badly, right?