What happens when an aspiring teenage movie critic hosts a Halloween party at her isolated mansion home, invites her friends (and some quasi-friends who are teenage influencers), and sets up a fun “game” involving a creepy clown, but the clown turns out to be like – psychotic? Well, you get There’s No Way I’d Die First by Lisa Springer, where our h
eroine Noelle gets to prove she has the chops to be a Final Girl, and show there is no way she’d die first.
This is a very modern story (we have podcasts, cryptocurrency, and smartphones all playing a role in this story) befitting a novel published in 2023 and set in the present. But I will show my age here, and relate this to the young adult horror novels I read as a teen, and say this was more Fear Street than Christopher Pike. Things do get intense for our teenage protagonists, and well, a lot of them die. The characters all feel very much in danger, and while in the grand tradition of horror movies, some characters scream “I am here to be cannon fodder” I was surprised by the order of some of the deaths.
The writing is pretty fast-moving, and the focus is on the characters scrambling for their lives. There isn’t really a deep dive into most of the teens in peril, we get a few facts about them sprinkled throughout, but honestly, there were times when I mixed up some of the characters with each other. But the characters are there to be terrorized by the evil clown, and get what the clown feels is their just deserts, and I don’t get the impression it’s trying to be that deep of a novel. I’m not a teenager, and I don’t interact with teenagers on a day-to-day basis, so some of the name drops around clothing and music just made me feel a bit old and out of touch, but I’m going to think that it must be current.
Gage the evil clown makes for a good ripped right from a horror movie antagonist. He’s sort of Pennywise (he’s hired by Noelle to be a guest at the party and scare the guests, and is described as a kind of knock-off Pennywise), sort of Freddy Krueger, sort of Ghostface from Scream. His motivation isn’t spelled out until the end, but it didn’t surprise me, and I felt was telegraphed pretty clearly throughout the novel. As with a lot of horror movies, there is a twist, but I feel most people’s mileage will vary with it. Honestly, by the end, I had had a good time reading the book, but I was ready for it to be done.
The heroine of the novel Noelle is a horror movie buff, hosting her movie club (Jump Scares) where she streams movies, with an eye toward black horror cinema. There is some great dissection of black characters in horror movies, the stats on who dies first in horror movies, and where “black” horror movies are set. As someone who is a fan of the horror genre, I love this kind of discussion and do wish the book had a bit more of it. This whole novel feels very cinematic and in that genre of self-aware horror. It nails that aspect of things.
I have kids in my life who are maybe still a little on the younger side for this book, but I plan on recommending it to them when they are a bit older. I don’t think the references will age too badly by the time they are ready for a fast, brutal, ya slasher. I am also looking forward to the author’s next book, I liked the bones of this and can appreciate I am not the target audience, but I’m glad this book exists for the people who are its target audience. It’s fun, fast, a bit silly (I mean silly, there is a tub full of piranha fish), violent, and the perfect Halloween reading. A treat, not a trick!
Closing out the review here are two random things that I fully loved about this novel:
- Each chapter opens with a quote from a scary movie. I loved going “Oh yeah, I saw that one!”
- At the end of the novel, the author provides a list of scary movies. So I was able to use that as kind of a checklist, going “Okay seen that one, didn’t see that one so add that to my to-watch list.”