theremightbecupcakes's Reviews (2.86k)

My version is 333 Films to Scare You to Death, but Goodreads won't allow me to add it, pointing instead to this one.

I couldn’t finish this. Too many other books I desperately want to read, and too many things about this book bothered me. Errors (Gypsy Rose Lee was a burlesque dancer, not a fortune teller), oddities (the nursery rhyme about counting birds is specifically about crows, not magpies), and word overuse (I stopped at the umpteenth usage of “shivered”. It was sometimes used twice in the same paragraph, and was pulling me out of the story. Finding it over and over was like hearing an unwanted beat in my head.) I truly wanted to like this novel, and I hung on longer than I wanted to out of hope.

Chilling. Truly chilling. Two things really stick with me:

The killing couple. They were masked the whole time, and an urban legend to those who never saw them, so they may have mingled amongst the other kids by day. No one knows who they really were, and they’re out there. And there are real people like that, waiting for a chance or an excuse to hurt people. The horror movie The Strangers was inspired by true events—people hurting people because they can, because of the shield of isolation. Then...the postcards. So many ramifications behind those. I actually got chills finishing that chapter.

The new company’s choice for the park. Pay to pretend you were there. In our murder-entertainment culture right now, where podcast hosts giggle over stories of murder, this is not far-fetched from reality. Therein lies the deep horror.