In ‘You’re Not Supposed To Die Tonight,’ by Kalynn Bayron, Charity is excited to be working over the summer. She isn’t entirely welcome at home. Her mom is married to a man who prefers not to have Charity there, so she is happy to be employed and thrilled to be the final girl, which is a role she has been working toward for several summers. She has her dream job at Camp Mirror Lake playing the final girl.
Camp Mirror Lake is a haunted house type of experience to the extreme. In the 1980s, a slasher film was made at the camp, and now every summer, the guests come to spend a night in the camp. They pay to be scared in this full-contact horror game. The staff re-creates scenes from the movie, ‘The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake.’ The staff members take great pride in making the fear realistic. The campers are rewarded if they make it through the night at the camp.
The summer is coming to an end, and only a few nights are left. Charity and her staff are especially excited about the last night when they really go for terror with the guests. On the last weekend, workers are failing to show up for their shifts, so extra friends are brought in to replace the missing workers. The funny thing is, all of the staff members actually stay at the lake all summer.
An unexpected old woman shows up at camp with a gun shouting crazy threats, the boss is a hands-off type who is rarely at the camp, and the sheriff who comes to help remove the woman is unsympathetic. When one of the workers is discovered dead, the goal becomes to find out who did it and why.
Charity and her staff find some old news articles about the camp, which adds more fear to an already unsettling end to the summer. The history of the lake creates tensions, and the murders begin to pile up. The ending has a definite twist, but … the ending really isn’t an ending at all. I had so many questions. The book left me wanting to know more.
The book was good, but the first part of the story was slow. The characters are not fully formed. I found myself wanting to know more about each character and also wanting to know more about the camp itself. The history of the camp is so compelling and mysterious that I wish it had been more integrated into the story. It messed with my mind to think about the history and what was actually happening behind the scenes. The staff at the camp had no idea about the history or the sinister things that were taking place. It would have made the story much more heart-pounding to have had more information. The book overall was good, but it could have been so much more.
Kalynn Bayron is one of my favorite new authors, but this book missed the mark. Please read it, but read without any expectations for greatness. It was a great Halloween scare. Do check out her book ‘This Poison Heart.’
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