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dtaylorbooks 's review for:
The Night Walker
by Diane Hoh
A different sort of cheese but something a little more robust, I think. Hoh’s characters are a bit more fleshed out, have better personalities, aren’t crappy people to each other. So already things are looking up.
What I will say against the Nightmare Hall books as a whole is that sometimes it can’t decide if it wants to be in high school or college. Talk of being in home room (not a thing in college) and just the general feel of the setting a lot of the time felt more high school when directly related to the classes themselves. It really wasn’t too sure of itself in that regard. And then it would talk about roommates and the campus and off-campus housing and it felt a little more college there but then SCHOOL would come back up and it would flip flop again. It made for a kind of jerky read from a setting standpoint.
As for the story Hoh does a good job of setting up suspense. All signs definitely point to Quinn doing these things while she’s sleepwalking but the only thing we don’t have is why and you’re left to claw through everything to figure that out while more people get attacked. Once other clues start getting dropped that work against Quinn, the suspense around her sleepwalking starts to crack and before long that theory is disproved. Even then that opens a whole new can of worms because who could it be then and still, WHY?
I wouldn’t say NIGHT WALKER was so much scary as it was suspenseful. People got hurt but no one actually died, there was never any kind of supernatural element to the plot, and all you had was, essentially, a murder mystery without the murder. Which is fine. I didn’t mind that at all. But it’s not horror. It was creepier when the potential was on Quinn possibly doing these things in her sleep and not knowing about it, or why she was doing it. Once that dissolved the suspense kind of went with it. It tapered off after that for me and once all the clues clicked into place to reveal who it really was it was just kind of meh. Standard fair, really.
THE NIGHT WALKER is still better than the later Fear Street books just because all of the characters are better and more realistic but I definitely wasn’t scared reading it. Suspenseful, sure. But not scary.
3.5
What I will say against the Nightmare Hall books as a whole is that sometimes it can’t decide if it wants to be in high school or college. Talk of being in home room (not a thing in college) and just the general feel of the setting a lot of the time felt more high school when directly related to the classes themselves. It really wasn’t too sure of itself in that regard. And then it would talk about roommates and the campus and off-campus housing and it felt a little more college there but then SCHOOL would come back up and it would flip flop again. It made for a kind of jerky read from a setting standpoint.
As for the story Hoh does a good job of setting up suspense. All signs definitely point to Quinn doing these things while she’s sleepwalking but the only thing we don’t have is why and you’re left to claw through everything to figure that out while more people get attacked. Once other clues start getting dropped that work against Quinn, the suspense around her sleepwalking starts to crack and before long that theory is disproved. Even then that opens a whole new can of worms because who could it be then and still, WHY?
I wouldn’t say NIGHT WALKER was so much scary as it was suspenseful. People got hurt but no one actually died, there was never any kind of supernatural element to the plot, and all you had was, essentially, a murder mystery without the murder. Which is fine. I didn’t mind that at all. But it’s not horror. It was creepier when the potential was on Quinn possibly doing these things in her sleep and not knowing about it, or why she was doing it. Once that dissolved the suspense kind of went with it. It tapered off after that for me and once all the clues clicked into place to reveal who it really was it was just kind of meh. Standard fair, really.
THE NIGHT WALKER is still better than the later Fear Street books just because all of the characters are better and more realistic but I definitely wasn’t scared reading it. Suspenseful, sure. But not scary.
3.5