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A review by nielsm
Final Girls by Mira Grant
3.0
(Review copy received from netgalley.)
Writing stories is hard. So many things can go wrong. So many things you can fail at. Character development, plotting, pacing, world-building, what have you. Which is why usually, if anything, books get worse as they go along. But this novella bucks the trend and goes from eye-rolley to fairly fucking all-around decent.
Protagonist's father gets mauled by pseudo-science, she becomes a science journalist, vengefully debunking all the pseudo-science for justice. Presently, she visits a scientist who's invented full immersion virtual reality (plus drugs to make you forget it's not actual reality) and uses it to... scare people into getting along better. Because clearly that's the first use case anyone'd think of. Anyway, case in point, two sisters who hate each other's guts get chased around by a giant scarecrow for a bit, and suddenly they well and truly love each other. Of course the intrepid journalist has to try it out in order to write a fair debunking of it. Also, for science! Of course, then things immediately go very, very wrong.
Now this starts with some extremely crude exposition:
> If she couldn't save her father, she was going to save everyone else. It was redemption. It was obsession. It was the only thing she had.
I mean, why think of a clever and entertaining way to communicate this to the reader, when you can just straight up tell them, right?
But once it gets to the VR and the scaries show up it turns into a solid horror story. Writing gets a lot better (if a tad over the top at times), pacing is spot on, and there's a competent ending to tie it all up, too.
Writing stories is hard. So many things can go wrong. So many things you can fail at. Character development, plotting, pacing, world-building, what have you. Which is why usually, if anything, books get worse as they go along. But this novella bucks the trend and goes from eye-rolley to fairly fucking all-around decent.
Protagonist's father gets mauled by pseudo-science, she becomes a science journalist, vengefully debunking all the pseudo-science for justice. Presently, she visits a scientist who's invented full immersion virtual reality (plus drugs to make you forget it's not actual reality) and uses it to... scare people into getting along better. Because clearly that's the first use case anyone'd think of. Anyway, case in point, two sisters who hate each other's guts get chased around by a giant scarecrow for a bit, and suddenly they well and truly love each other. Of course the intrepid journalist has to try it out in order to write a fair debunking of it. Also, for science! Of course, then things immediately go very, very wrong.
Now this starts with some extremely crude exposition:
> If she couldn't save her father, she was going to save everyone else. It was redemption. It was obsession. It was the only thing she had.
I mean, why think of a clever and entertaining way to communicate this to the reader, when you can just straight up tell them, right?
But once it gets to the VR and the scaries show up it turns into a solid horror story. Writing gets a lot better (if a tad over the top at times), pacing is spot on, and there's a competent ending to tie it all up, too.