'm going to have to talk about this book in some detail to fully express all the ways it disappointed me, so fair warning that there are spoilers ahead.

The premise I liked.




It's a tried and true horror premise; a bunch of people show up to a house fully of deadly such-and-such in hopes of getting rich and instead end up getting killed off one by one. It's October, the month where I traditionally binge a bunch of horror books and movies. Let's do this!

My first inclination that this was going to be a real miss was the fact that one of the beneficiaries was the puzzle master's ex-wife, who tells a story about how cruel and obsessive her ex-husband was (including locking her in an escape room during their marriage for so long that she soiled herself), and yet when she's presented with the fact that her own former residence has been retrofitted into some kind of series of contained escape rooms, she thinks nothing of it and agrees to participate with very little convincing needed. There's a brief and flimsy reference to his inheritance going to some corporation and the ex wants to make sure that doesn't happen (more on that later), but it's not enough to get someone to the point where they would face almost certain death because they know the guy behind it was already a sadist and, at several points, mentions that she believes he's getting worse.

The second indication that this was going to be disappointing is that it becomes quickly apparent that each escape room is designed to eliminate one of the group... but that each room seems to be custom designed to kill one specific person. Later in the book, we learn that this whole puzzle house is basically an audition of sorts (we'll get to that momentarily), a survival of the fittest kind of thing to see which among them deserves to live. But, if that's the case, then why is each escape room designed to kill a specific person? It feels like the author was writing two different books; one where it was a "last man standing" game to see who would come out on top... and one where it was a carefully calibrated death trap designed to kill a bunch of specific people in a specific order. Those two things are opposites and yet the author uses them interchangeably throughout the book.

The final straw that cemented my disappointment with this book is the ending. It's just so completely random and explains absolutely nothing. It turns out that the puzzle master Alexei isn't dead after all (yeah, no kidding... that was painfully obvious from the first couple of chapters), and this whole thing is a test to ensure the sole survivor is worthy of joining the corporation that's mentioned throughout the book... which is basically a demonic cult looking to usher in the end of the world. And at the end of the book, the protagonist emerges from the house to find that the apocalypse has already taken place, the bodies of the house's other victims have been raised from the dead, and he sets off to claim his reward from (or kill) Alexei.

On top of that, there's dumb twists that make no logical sense. The protagonist is a convict who is accompanied by a guard... but the guard turns out to be an acolyte of this cult and was the presumed favorite the whole time... but the guard was randomly assigned by the warden to accompany the convict; he had no say in the assignment, so how was he part of the scheme? Most of the people in the house turn out to be people connected to the organization by being involved in one of their nefarious plots, so this was the corporation trying to cover their tracks... but the book never explains what that nefarious scheme was.

Overall, this was a really disappointing and frustrating book because it was just all over the map. It felt like the author didn't have a clear sense of what he was trying to accomplish, and kept alternating between different and competing ideas he had for the book. And then, at the very end, he decides to just throw all of reality out the window and come up with some bizarre supernatural ending. All in all, it was hard to focus on the horror when so much of the character development and plot was confusing or downright poorly executed.

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Created Jan 18, 2025 at 7:07pm • Submit your own review...