James Han Mattson

It's hard to say who this book is for, as it isn't straight horror, and it isn't straight lit fic. The premise of a full-contact haunted house/escape room experience sounds thrilling, but it takes up so little space in this book it is just a gruesome interstitial to the rest of the character story. There is a lot of social commentary on racism and sexism and homophobia. The goons in stage makeup meant to scare contestant at the house pale in comparison to the horrors of prejudice, making the scariest thing in the house the introduction of a scorned white man there to take revenge.… (mer)

I struggle with how to categorize this one. It's ostensibly about a murder that takes place in an extreme escape-room-type attraction, but it really supposed to be more about the characters involved. It reminds me a lot of the films of Jordan Peele, where, you know, at the end we realize the monster is us and that we're all living in the racial haunted house that is America.

While the characters were kind of interesting, however, the motivation for the murder as it's revealed makes no sense at all, and the ending doesn't really hang together with the big-picture thematic ideas about race and privilege that the author is trying to get across.… (mer)