Let's Talk Books

I have two prefaces to this review: 1) it will not be spoiler free, 2) it won’t be positive. As much as I dislike giving poor reviews, I am also not willing to fib.

How to Survive a Horror Story started well. We were introduced to a woman shrouded in sadness, with some light mystery in her backstory, and a crowd of glamorous, possibly sinister, horror writers. We were also introduced to a house, so creepy and unsettling it bordered on cliché, and a cast of creepy servants. Not long after this the plot diverged, becoming closer to Escape Room (2019) than I had expected, and then action began.

Melanie Brown has been invited to Queen Manor, the house of late horror legend Mortimer Queen. Having met the man only once, an afternoon of which she has little recollection, Melanie is shocked when her invitation arrives: Mortimer has left her something in his will. Joining her for the reading are horror authors highbrow and erotic, social media mad and virtually reclusive. There’s Petey, whose bestseller sits on syllabuses around the world, but who has never published anything else; hugely successful country boy Buck, who left the shiny, fast-paced world of publishing to return home to his rural small town roots; Chester, who started his career as a children’s author and revels in the controversy, and clicks, generated by his increasingly cult-like following of impressionable youths; Crystal as cold and hard as she is sultry and forward, an erotic horror vixen sharp with ambition; Scott a horror heart-throb off his meds, splitting his time between magazine covers and book-signings, whilst holding onto tenuous calm with both hands; and Winnie, horror’s resident gossip, a bitchy, backstabbing, lecherous woman of a certain age, and pedigree. Together this unlikely eight-some must make it through Mortimer’s house of horrors, solving devilish puzzles, and trying not to lose themselves, or their lives, in the process.

This was an ambitious work, with seven POV characters, and asides into short stories. I applaud Arnold’s ambition, but unfortunately I don’t think the potential of this story was realised. The characters fell flat, the house, although suitably scary, was nonsensical and under developed, the pacing and quickly realised motivation stripped the story of tension and suspense, and the voices were abundantly samey.

Multiple POVS, in a story like this, are sink or swim, and in this instance I think they sank the story. The first issue is the similarity. If it wasn’t for the name at the top and the content of the chapters – shifting of perspective in a literal sense (the POV character is now looking at everyone else), and the sojourns into backstory – I would not have been able to tell who was speaking. Given we were moving between gender, age group, upbringing, class, and a litany of other differences, it seems ludicrous that this people should sound so similar, yet they are. They even use the same turns of phrase, although to her credit Arnold shoehorns in some obvious southern-isms for Buck. You might think, ‘well, the content is different, isn’t it obvious?’ to which I’d answer ‘yes, but there should be other signs.’ I shouldn’t need to read the name on the chapter, or wait for Scott to start detailing his anger episodes, or for Petey to tell me about his sad life, I should know from the tone, the voice, I should sense the essence of the character whose head I’m in!

Another issue was the supposed unreliability of the narrators. One of the comp titles used for this was Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone, which is one of my favourite mystery series. I have read all of them (even the Christmas short) and they are rife with unreliability, but what works about those is that we are in one mind. Ernest is unreliable because he doesn’t know everything, and he is coming from a specific Golden-Age-tinged point of view. The others are unreliable because they have motives to lie. We understand both of these things, and it creates a layer of tension, or uncertainty. We are aware that, at any moment, the other shoe could drop. Arnold does not manage to construct this same tension, rather, in moving between POVs, we are left wondering if any of them are unreliable. They all seem to have a version of events in mind, which differs hugely from that Mortimer has constructed, but we get no answer on whose version is accurate. At the end, when Melanie is confronted with the alleged proof of these actions, she doesn’t question it. Why would Mortimer have this stuff, all this proof, and have done nothing with it? It seems especially odd, as Petey and Chester seem to have definitely done what they are accused of, which we are asked to believe based on their POV, but the other five, who claim in their own minds not to done what they’re accused of (would they lie in their own heads?), we are meant to disbelieve.

It must also be said that the sins which have brought them to this house of horrors are not exactly equal. Petey, Chester, and Crystal have allegedly done quite big, quite awful things to Mortimer. Scott has done a violent thing, or quite possibly hasn’t, but in the scheme of things it hardly seems worth killing over. Winnie, whilst unpleasant, has possibly damaged Mortimer’s reputation – except she hasn’t, actually, because her rumours had no meaningful negative impact on his career. An then there’s Buck, the least guilty of all, who has supposedly “blackmailed” Mortimer into… agreeing to publish his book, which was already under offer, and which made Mortimer thousands of dollars, by… alluding to the affair Mortimer actually was having… and then never asking him for more money, or using that against him in any real way, or revealing the affair… bit of a shit blackmailer. For his trouble, Buck is then starved to death by Melanie in a series of events which seems utterly ludicrous, in an already cartoonishly ludicrous novel.

Speaking of, if there was ever a two dimensional, utterly stupid, wet wipe of a woman, it’s Melanie Brown. She questions nothing, she learns nothing about the world, the house, any of it, she kills two people because she believes the word of a man who was demonstrably untrustworthy (affair, hello), and yet does not cut off her nasty, abusive mother. She supposedly earns great success with her collection of boring, pedestrian ‘short stories’ (which are some of the worst examples of fiction within fiction I’ve ever read, as they do not build character, or encapsulate an episodic narrative, but rather hip-check ‘real’ people and otherwise fail to meet the technical or structural tenets of the short story form), but needed to be a victim turned murderer in order to have a story to tell. That itself tells you everything you need to know about Melanie – she is a nothing. A no one. A vehicle of a revenge for a character we barely get to meet. An aspiring writer who has nothing to say, and seemingly no imagination.

Moving on though, from the elements of this which were subjectively poor (in my opinion) I think it’s time to be objective. The characters were poorly constructed, as signalled by the similarity in narrative voice. The setting, although allowed to be sprawling and confusing, was also confused: there was little sense of place, I didn’t understand where I was in relation to anywhere else, nor was I especially fearful of what seemed like a large, deadly escape room – complete with props. There were issues with SPaG, sentences were fragmented and never picked up again, and on more than one occasion incorrect conjugations left me attempting to parse meaning from nonsensical strings of words – this is a Galley, but the issue was widespread enough to ruin immersion.

How to Survive a Horror Story was, ultimately, poor. Weak in too many ways to leave me with overall satisfaction, and neither scary nor funny enough to make up for those weaknesses. 2.5 stars.