tenjay 's review for:

Burn Down, Rise Up by Vincent Tirado

5.0

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I really enjoyed this one! It’s horror, but it’s more like social horror, if that makes sense. There’s this place called the Echo, a sort of alternate reality that reflects a city’s or neighborhood’s past. Kids around the world are challenging themselves to enter. The only problem is that one you go in, it’s hard to get back out. This particular Echo is the Bronx in the 1970s when it was run down and ignored by basically everyone. It was run by slumlords, and the police and firefighters rarely came in to help the people who lived there. The Echo took all of that and amplified the rage and pain felt by the people who had been abandoned by the rest of the city, turning it into a literal fiery hellhole. Unfortunately, Raquel and her friends have to go into it in order to save her mother and another of their friends who have been infected by the Echo and are dying. Will they make it out alive? And even if they do, will they ever be the same after what happens to them there?