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A review by trevert
The Mary Shelley Club by Goldy Moldavsky
3.0
Good, but... Damn, I wanted a lot more. I LOVED the concept, which sounds ideal for a horror movie fan like myself. Our heroine changes schools after a traumatic event and ends up being a middle class girl in a rich kids' hangout, shades of Veronica Mars. More unusual events have her connecting with the Mary Shelley Club, a secret group of dedicated horror fans who meet privately, watch horror flicks together amid much popcorn and fun, and plan elaborate horror-based pranks on their more annoying classmates. Obnoxious Chad crosses one of the group unknowingly? Yeah, he's gonna encounter a hook-handed killer on his next parking make-out session.
The goal is to scare their victims enough to make them scream, not inflict permanent damage, though some excellent public humiliation that trashes their high school rep is always a bonus. Things get weird when unexpected elements start popping up in their pranks and it becomes clear that someone dangerous is out to get their club. This all sounds fantastic to me, like a perfect gumbo of Scream, the aforementioned Veronica Mars, and TAG: The Assassination Game. Alas...
One disappointment was the heroine, who was definitely not Veronica Mars. You the reader will figure out who the bad guy is well before she does and as leads go, she's terribly passive. Stuff happens, she reacts, more stuff happens, she reacts, etc. There were many times I was grinding my teeth just wishing she would DO something.
The other odd eyebrow rise is that I'd expected a love letter to horror and the idea of a horror club taking on an actual mystery killer just sounds unbeatable, but as the book progressed it began to set off my "Mazes and Monsters" alarm bells. I was an avid D&D player back in the day and I well remember the early 80's when everyone was sure that there just MUST be something "evil" about this RPG stuff... "If the kids are into this, there must be something fundamentally wrong with them!" Unfortunately I got some of that here, with the horror club members being portrayed as somehow "damaged", as if something was just deeply wrong with kicking back and enjoying "Return of the Living Dead". There's a lot of name dropping so it's obvious the author knows, or researched, the genre, but I didn't come out with the feeling that she particularly loved it, which was sad.
Still, it's a solid read - I finished it and was never annoyed enough to put it down, and it does deliver some fun tension. I just felt like it could have been so much more.
The goal is to scare their victims enough to make them scream, not inflict permanent damage, though some excellent public humiliation that trashes their high school rep is always a bonus. Things get weird when unexpected elements start popping up in their pranks and it becomes clear that someone dangerous is out to get their club. This all sounds fantastic to me, like a perfect gumbo of Scream, the aforementioned Veronica Mars, and TAG: The Assassination Game. Alas...
One disappointment was the heroine, who was definitely not Veronica Mars. You the reader will figure out who the bad guy is well before she does and as leads go, she's terribly passive. Stuff happens, she reacts, more stuff happens, she reacts, etc. There were many times I was grinding my teeth just wishing she would DO something.
The other odd eyebrow rise is that I'd expected a love letter to horror and the idea of a horror club taking on an actual mystery killer just sounds unbeatable, but as the book progressed it began to set off my "Mazes and Monsters" alarm bells. I was an avid D&D player back in the day and I well remember the early 80's when everyone was sure that there just MUST be something "evil" about this RPG stuff... "If the kids are into this, there must be something fundamentally wrong with them!" Unfortunately I got some of that here, with the horror club members being portrayed as somehow "damaged", as if something was just deeply wrong with kicking back and enjoying "Return of the Living Dead". There's a lot of name dropping so it's obvious the author knows, or researched, the genre, but I didn't come out with the feeling that she particularly loved it, which was sad.
Still, it's a solid read - I finished it and was never annoyed enough to put it down, and it does deliver some fun tension. I just felt like it could have been so much more.