You're Not Supposed To Die Tonight was my first slasher book ever and...

 

I’m going to be 100% real, I think this might be the first book that I’ve read on this blog that I discovered because of BookTok. Like, BookTok definitely shows up on my For You page, but the book I’m talking about today, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron, is the first BookTok book (that I hadn’t already read) that I’ve been persuaded to read.

The blurb says that Charity Curtis has the summer job of her dreams: playing the “final girl” at Camp Mirror Lake. Guests pay to be scared in this full-contact terror game, as Charity and her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. The more realistic the fear, the better for business. But on the last weekend of the season, Charity’s co-workers begin disappearing. And when one ends up dead, Charity’s role as the final girl suddenly becomes all too real. If Charity and her girlfriend Bezi hope to survive the night, they’ll need to figure out what the killer is after. But as they unravel the bloody history of the real Mirror Lake, Charity discovers that there may be more to the story than she ever suspected…

Chapter one opens on Charity in her final girl era. It seems like people are playing this terror game, and had I not read the blurb, I’d have fully thought someone is getting murdered. This woman gets carried off by the person playing the killer, this woman, by the way, who has like welts on her face – so they weren’t kidding when they said full contact on the blurb. And even though you know that she’s just working at this horror simulator, the place is immediately very creepy vibes. They’re out in the woods in upstate New York, they live in a converted motel, you know, a classic slasher movie setting. Chapter two sees Charity and the others running through their daily tasks and then playing the simulation. At the camp, people aren’t supposed to go into the lake, and Charity thinks she ends up seeing someone in the lake mid-game, so homegirl gets very stressarina.

You see her relationship with her mother described as, “Being the child of an irresponsible parent who doesn’t care what you’re doing as long as it doesn’t mess up her plans”. But to be honest, other than that, you don’t really see all that much in terms of her family and her family relationships. Unfortunately, this does happen for a lot of the characters in that you get little to no expansion on who they are, so it’s kind of difficult to get invested in them – and that does come as kind of an issue when you’re doing a slasher. You don’t care if certain people die.

I really appreciated how queer this was. You’ve got Charity, obviously, and her girlfriend, Bezi. Then there’s this gay guy, Porter, who Charity works with. I feel like horror is so inherently queer somehow. I liked Bezi when she showed up. You find out that she and Charity have been together for a couple of years, and that experience and time together is evident in the way they speak to each other. There’s a bit that made me laugh where Bezi threatens to break up with Charity if she chooses to put on an ugly wig. Although, to mention Porter for a second, I had to read this book over three sittings, and I’ll be honest, by the end of the book, when Porter (and the other characters) were mentioned, because you knew so little about them, I had trouble actually remembering who was who. Like, I remembered that Bezi was Charity’s girlfriend, and that Tasha and Paige were in her friend group too.

So, I’m dumb, nor do I consume a lot of horror or mystery content. I love the aesthetic of horror, it’s why I love Dragula so much, but in terms of actual horror… nope. That’s why I think for me, the suspense and the creepiness of the book really worked for me. Like, I think there could have been anything and it have been done semi-well and it would have got me. And this is just me doubling down on the point that I think the horror and eeriness was done well in this book. In terms of the mystery, I’m not going to spoil the book, but Charity keeps seeing this dark figure and I assumed the figure would be one of a few people. I’m not going to spoil who I thought it was, or who it ended up being, but I will say, it wasn’t who I thought it was going to be. Also, in the early bits of the book, there’re a bunch of things that Charity conveniently mentions to the reader that all sound like good set up for a slasher movie, like the bad signal, the one truck they have that doesn’t really work, and how deep they are in the woods. Also, once Bezi and Paige turn up, there’s mention of how the camp is haunted.

While I’ll give the book the point that it wasn’t predictable, it only wasn’t predictable because when everything all started happening and, I guess, the plot started happening, it went in a completely different direction to the first half of the book. I’ll try to not spoil it, but it went almost in a supernatural-slash-paranormal route with little to no explanation. And I think that’s where the book lost me. Because I was reading it and when it got to that part, I was sort of just sat there like, “…What?” And while there may well have been something that I missed, that’s my problem, I feel like there was something I missed. The shift to the second part didn’t feel quite connected for me. I do think this is something that could have been remedied had the book been longer, especially for this second half with the more supernatural-slash-paranormal aspect.

However, even amongst all my confusion as to what was actually going on towards the end, I can’t deny that the horror and tension was really good. Like I said, I don’t particularly consume a lot of horror content, so the bar isn’t that high for me.

To close out, there’s this one person on YouTube, I think their channel is called Muniz, and they make Drag Race edits. This is relevant, trust me. But they use this one sound bite of Mo Heart when reviewing the runways where Mo just goes, “Oh, okay…” in a very whelmed tone. Where the relevance of that lies is that is how I felt by the end of this book. It had a really strong start, but the turn it took towards the end was just so… Oh, okay… vibes. Kind of like we ramped up, preparing for this big thing at the end just to not get it.

Okay, bye!