I knew frat houses were cursed, but The Pledge proves it

 

I think the last horror/slasher book that I read was You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight, but today I’m talking about The Pledge by Cale Dietrich, which I picked up because I’ve read Dietrich’s other books, and I’m finally getting around to this one.

In lieu of the other slasher book I’ve read, I remember being disappointed by You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight. Not completely, it certainly is a book with its merits – I remember the horror and tension being incredible, but then the book ended up taking a paranormal twist towards the end, and that was what threw me off, because it felt sort of unfounded in the context of the book, and that was something I was a little wary of coming into The Pledge.

Anyway, the blurb says that incoming college freshman Sam believes that joining a fraternity is the best way to form a friend group – and his best chance of moving on from his past. He is the survivor of a horrific, world-famous crime spree known as the Lake Priest Massacre, in which a masked killer hunter down Sam and his friends, murdering two of them. Sam had to do the unthinkable to survive that night, and it completely derailed him. He sees college, and his new identity as a frat boy, his best shot at living a life not defined by the killings. He starts to flirt with one of the brothers, cute journalism student Oren Fisher, who, to Sam’s surprise, seems to accept Sam’s troubled past. And then one of his frat brothers is found dead. A new masked murderer, one clearly inspired by the original, starts stalking and slaying the frat boys of Munroe University. Now Sam must race against the clock to figure out the murderer’s identity and why they are threatening Sam’s new friends before more lives – and his own chance to move on – are lost forever.

Now I tend to write a few bits and pieces before I start to read a book (normally the intro, content warnings, the blurb, and then maybe an initial thought), and my one for this book was that my assumption with Oren being a journalism student, he was likely going to have some conflict with Sam in that perhaps he is investigating the massacre Sam survived.

Chapter one has Sam, at sixteen, in this cabin where he’s on a trip with his boyfriend, Eli, and he has this uneasy feeling. Eli comes in and tells him he has a surprise in ten minutes, so Sam showers, and in the meantime, someone left their door wide open. We then see this killer, that Sam assumes he’s called Shawn, and was a stalker that made Eli transfer schools. He tries to kill Sam, but Sam manages to stab him through the neck. Chapter two hops to Sam, two years later, and he’s immediately reeling from the feeling that he’s a killer. You see that he understands it was a Shawn or him scenario, that if he didn’t do it, he’d be dead, but that doesn’t make the fact he killed someone any better for himself. But he’s wanting to make a better life for himself at university and he actually meets Oren really quickly, as Oren is his RA. Do I know what that is? No, because they don’t exist in the UK.

Speaking of things the UK doesn’t have, or that I don’t think it has: fraternities. That might just be the worst transition you’ve ever seen, but you’re welcome. Oren is a part of the frat that Sam goes to join, and Oren has an ex in the fraternity, Mikey, and you see Mikey giving Sam a lot of evil stares, which in my mind was supposed to make us think that Mikey was going to be the new killer. You do get an idea of who Sam thinks the killer is about halfway through the book. What I will ultimately say is when you find out who the killer is, it certainly was a reveal. You know that gif of that white girl on TikTok (really specific, you’re welcome) who just goes ‘oh’? It’s the one who did rounds on stan Twitter too. The girl who made the “girl who is going to be okay” TikTok? Her. The reveal felt very much like the “oh” video. Like it certainly happened, and then you also get the reasoning as to why the new killer became the killer. That also happened. Like, the reasoning that was given made sense, but I personally felt like I needed a few more seeds to be sown for me to truly buy it. It was one of those where it made sense with what was given to us, but it was kind of like, “Okay? Is that it?”

His mother ripped off his traumatic experience to write a book. Sam does explain that he also gets why she did it. He mentions that her first book was a hit, but then none of her follow ups hit as hard, and that her career apparently stagnated, so that was the reason. You see that she did change details of it and character names, so it wasn’t just a straight rip, but the whole thing was clear that she’d used the experience Sam had gone through as a means to boost her career once again. The relationship between them seemed to come in bursts. He very intensely was angry and hated her – rightfully so – but it felt like we could have had more softening up of the relationship throughout the book for them to have ended up where they ended up. Like, it would have been nice for his mother to have actually explained herself, because (and minor spoiler) while they begin to fix their relationship at the end of the book, that also just feels like it’s quite sudden a thing to have happened when they barely even interacted throughout the book.

One immediately unrelatable thing about Sam, ignoring the surviving the killer, he likes beer. I get that he said he was homeschooled and that he didn’t have a lot of friends, but he didn’t need to lie and say to the readers that beer was good. Besides the bare-faced lying to the reader, to me, pretty much everything I can think of (and can remember) that Sam did more or less made sense. I can’t really criticise him for anything I don’t think. Again, it’s a slasher book, I feel like quite often you don’t get to know the survivor of a slasher, but I think you got a decent feel for who Sam was, especially as someone who already survived one massacre.

I think an inherent issue with slashers in general is that quite often, since most of the cast ends up getting murdered, you don’t always get the chance to get to know them very well, so when they die, yes, it’s shocking that someone has died but, it doesn’t always hit that emotionally. There were a few people that the book had made me attach to, Oren and Sam’s family, but everyone else who was a target, I think they ran the issue of the book not wanting to pollute itself with too many characters, but at the same time wanting the shock of people dying. I don’t know, it's an odd line and I’m not sure how to tote it. My only thought would have been to, and this sounds horrible, kill the important people. Like, perhaps had a member or two of Sam’s family died, some of the killings would have hit that much harder.

Okay, bye!