Hmmm, I can't quite put my finger on what keeps me from giving this book a better review. The characters were kind of blah. I guess that's good in the case of some characters

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since many of the friends were murdered in gruesome ways, or turn out to be killers. Okay, no, typing this out I'm coming to realize that nothing really surprised me. I feel like the author was doing their darndest to create twists (like Cole and Rust's relationship or the betrayal of Matt and Ronnie)

, but honestly I wasn't drawn in enough into the story or the characters to feel surprise or emotion when these twists were revealed. Yeah, I think that was it. It's a great and gruesome (seriously, we got some bloody descriptions in here so I recommend older teens, even if the reading level is a bit easier than that) horror book, but there's not a lot of depth. I can't even say I had fun with it. *shrug*

Wait, there was one part, where the dad was at home worrying about his daughter at the party. It was nice to have a POV of the parent thinking normal parent things and not being written as a jerk from a teen's POV. The parent was written like a human being.

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But on the note of parents, can we talk about the UNREALISTIC-ness of the rest of this town? Seriously. I've suspended my sense of belief when reading "Unwind" where parents are willing to sell their unruly children for body parts, but this is a normal, rural town in Idaho with one diner and a small high school where everyone knows everyone. Not a sci-fi. If you want me to believe this is a normal town with a dark secret and that a clown is going to chase me in a cornfield and kill me in gruesome ways, you gotta make the setting as believable as possible. A town full of Boomer adults that hate the youths so much they're willing to team together and mass murder a town's generation while dressed as clowns is so far fetched I cannot accept it, therefore I'm too busy being skeptical to be scared.