Clearly written with love for the genre, but didn’t do too much for me. Characters were bitchy and bland, narrative was contrived, there was no sense of place, and the final act made it my least favorite kind of whodunnit

I received this as an e-arc via NetGalley for review.

This was a lot of fun! It gave me Nightmare on Elm Street vibes. The characters were well fleshed out and believable. The story was engaging and well-paced. It touches on some serious topics like, child actors and the abuse and trauma that some of them face.

Overall, I had a good time reading this and it kept me guessing and excited about when I would next sit down to read. ( )

I was excited (and appreciative) to have the opportunity to read an advanced galley of this a few months prior to its release date.

As billed in its description, it does indeed pay homage to horror/slasher films and touches upon the price of fame (particularly for child actors and even adults for whom fame is tied to dark themes/horror). It also alludes to the possibility of horror fans to get carried away by darkness, the propensity for social media/entertainment to magnify and spread it, and that horrifying details of true crime have become entertainment currency of sorts. (But it doesn't examine any of this too closely and how could it when it exists because of it?)

A spoiler-free plot summary:
30 years prior, Laura - now working as an entertainment journalist for a small print pub - changed her appearance, name, and forged a new identity in attempt to outrun her past as a childhood star. Her last movie as a child lead was in a horror/film rumored to be cursed as most of the cast members died or were killed in circumstances that paralleled the movie's plot.

When the movie opens, Laura is sent by her ex-boyfriend editor on assignment to cover the filming of a horror movie which - somehow unbeknownst to her until she's mid-flight - is a sequel to the movie she starred in as a child. She fights off panic attacks as old memories resurface and then people involved with the second movie start dying too. Is the curse real? If so, what's behind it? Demonic influences? A serial killer tied to both films? Or, is Laura herself the bad seed? (Very different plot, but sorta reminiscent of Night Film.)

The book uses 'multi-media artifacts' in support of the story - images of movie scripts, blog posts, movie reviews, posts from horror fansites, etc. These worked ok in ebook format, though they may be better and easier to interact with in a print copy.

I didn't find this to be scary at all. It wasn't thriller-ish in the typical sense of the genre either. I was just curious enough about what or who was behind it all to keep reading.

There are a lot of subplots that go nowhere and are kinda weird. Pretty much every character Laura interacts with in her support system (the editor/ex-boyfriend, the sister, the psychic, the mother, the fellow childhood star, and more) range from sad-sack hangers on, to unsavories with questionable motives. The ending was a big 'what??' but not in a good way.

TLDR: sort of a jumbly, nihilistic-lite stew of horror-ish ingredients tossed together such that I'm not sure what I read, what I was supposed to take from it, or if there's a point at all. Or maybe that was the horror in some sort of meta-sense? Don't know and don't much care.

If you're drawn to this, check it out from your library--I'm not sorry I read it, but I would have not been happy had I paid full publisher price for it. (I'd say the same about most horror, for that matter.) ( )