Reviews tagging 'Death'

Don't Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones

80 reviews

challenging dark emotional funny mysterious fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

First, I want to thank Libby for granting me the ability to read I was a Teenage Slasher before my reread and move along to Reaper. It has allowed me to see Jade’s world through Slasher goggles and I just feel like Jade would so want this for me. It’s FASCINATING now to see real world horror diverge from slasher lore. I love so much all of these books and want to forever be talking about 5 different metas of horror. This series is a gift to Scream-lovers in particular. I want Jade’s opinion of Scream (2022) or I will die. 

The mind of this man. I cannot put my thoughts into words but he sure can. I loved it though, if that weren’t clear.

And I want to heartily recommend listening to the audiobook!!! It's a full cast and it adds so much to the work. It's easy to read but it's much harder to inflect words with feeling, and the readers do an incredible job singeing Stephen Graham Jones' words into the mind.

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rskennedy1066's review

4.25
dark mysterious fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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dark emotional sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Great story but the prose makes it somewhat difficult to understand at times. 

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adventurous dark funny hopeful tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

It took me a while to get into this one because of the multiple perspectives, a sharp contrast to book 1 taking place entirely from Jade's POV. However, this did give us the chance to see Proofrock from new and enlightening angles, and notched up the tension by giving us POVs from characters about to meet their demise. I think the multiple POVs also made the list of suspects extra long.

As with book 1, this sequel was wild in the best way with twisty plotlines braided amongst one another and delivering frequent little revelations that never ceased to be thrilling. Amidst the excitement of the mystery are woven heavy themes, threaded with care and passion. I appreciated that Jade's inter-chapter slasher essays got an update in the form of Gal's own assignments written for the new history teacher —
and what a delight when I began to figure out how smart Gal was and what she was doing with these essays
. And that third-reel body dump – nasty. So much skin, eugh.

Also as with book 1, there still seem to be some loose ends that I am really hoping get resolved in the final installment. These include unanswered questions from book 1. I found Jade's final reasoning of the roles of
Cinnamon and Ginger
, plus Gal's account of
the wig stands and spirit glue in Cinn's bathroom
, to be a bit confusing, but maybe I just needed to read more carefully.

Finally, there was a moment where I thought SGJ was becoming self-aware and realizing the romantic tension between Jade and Letha (page 251), and when Jade briefly gets a foil in the form of a gay high schooler in the video store, but...maybe not. All I'm saying is if Jade's crush doesn't get acknowledged before the end of this series, then I'm gonna be in Stephen's walls eating his drywall because how can he not see how queer his heroine is??

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challenging dark tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: Complicated
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

Expand filter menu Content Warnings
dark emotional funny hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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challenging dark tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Content Warnings: murder, violence, blood, injury description, animal death, gun violence, off page sexual assault of a minor, death of a parent, off page suicide attempt, and institutionalization

The middle book in a series is always a little hard to talk about without spoiling anything from the first book. But this installment continues to follow Jade Daniels and the small town of Proofrock. There are a lot of POV’s which felt reminiscent of ‘Salem’s Lot to me where the story is about the town and what happened there rather than one character’s experience. Which was something I really enjoyed and I think kept out the middle book curse. 

There was more brutality in this book, less waiting between killings and the twists just kept coming. The pacing was great as well, I think it just didn’t hit quite as hard as the first one. 

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dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This book surprised me. I went in expecting not to be as big as a fan due to the swapping of POVs constantly but it was not as confusing as I’d thought it’d be. Jade is the ultimate final girl and I can’t wait for her to end the curse of Indian Lake

Spoilers if you were confused:
the way I took the ending of the book is that both cinnamon and ginger were the killers they killed everyone to blame it on Jade because they blame her for the Independence Day massacre

Melanie (Hardy’s dead daughter) came back to kill the people she deemed responsible for her deaths


DMS really only killed the people in the video store but they were only dying due to the poisoned cupcakes by Ginger/Cinnamon

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

There’s one book left to read. I think I’ll give it a go, even though this one was unimpressive to me. I’m trying to understand why so many others loved it. Maybe this is a genre I give up on after the last installment. Mostly, I am reading the last one just to finish it.

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