For all the evils of social media, there’s something nice about having followers. I’ve accumulated 330some on GR in recent years and I like the general idea of having people display that sort of interest in my reviews. But that’s as far as I’m comfortable taking that.
Some people take the idea of internet fame much, much further and this is a story of one of them. Sidney, her character’s name an obvious homage to Sidney Prescott of Scream franchise, is a fame hungry person, obsessed with horror. In fact, it was the Scream movies that first got her started down this bloody and gory winding road. And now in her 30s it is her refuge from the world in which she has thus far failed to make a mark. Sidney’s life leaves a lot to be desired. She had completely failed as a wife, she’s middling as a mother and she’s an available warm body of a cell phone store manager for a career. But she has good friends and optimism, the latter leading her to believe that she can parlay her passion for horror into a moneymaker. Because that’s the pervasive evils of social media, everyone thinks they can be the next (insert some Kardashian sort of waste of space here), everyone thinks they got what it takes. Sidney knows words alone (her reviews and tweets) won’t take her there (our social media addled society is too vapid for that and if you don’t think so check out how many more likes reviews with memes and gifs get and that’s just GR) so she also models, nude and bathes in blood. In fact, that’s how we’re introduced to her. She’s flexing her body in a bathtub of congealing blood while her gay bff is snapping away photos. And, because discretion and privacy are well and truly dead, on the world wide web it all goes. To be fair, Sidney actually think she is practicing some discretion, but alas she simply isn’t smart enough or cautious enough of a person, as frequently evidenced by her chattering her entire life away to a host of perfect strangers on the internet, for that and so soon enough she finds herself source of all sorts of unwanted attention. And so, to paraphrase Nietzsche, this is a book about a woman who had gazes into horror for so long, the horror gazed back. Now Sidney is the star of her very own slasher and she is determined to remain standing like a proper final girl. If this sounds like a dumb story about a dumb woman getting something like her just deserts and learning an important life lesson…it might have gone that way, but it didn’t. For one thing, the author, whoever she is, is too good of a writer for that. She writes dumb smartly and the book ends up being a much more engaging read than you might have anticipated. Even with all the clichés in it. Of which there are many. And mostly they are straight out of chicklit field, like the supersupportive roomie who used Girl in every freaking sentence or the supersupportive wildly flamboyant gay bffs. You probably have to be a horror fan to really appreciate this book and, by extent, Sidney. Thing is Sidney and I are very different genre fans, I prefer the psychological darkness, she leans toward the obvious, I enjoy literary horror, Sidney goes for gory B and C list movies. But still, there is enough mutual appreciation of a good scare that’s there and will probably resonate with most fans, despite their specific preferences. In the end this was a fairly fun read, despite many, many things, even despite the lamentable predictability of the final plot twist. It had potential to be a lot more, like maybe almost an A level, but got stuck and C going on B territory. It’d probably be fun as a B movie, actually, if somewhat meta. Many thanks to the publisher for providing a free copy for review purposes.
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