I heard about Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay while driving home after work. The premise sounded fantastic. I really wanted to check it out. While shopping a few months ago, I had the opportunity to pick it up, so I did. I expected a lot out of this book. Did it deliver? Let’s find out.
Summary
In the 90s, a film named Horror Movie was created by Valentina and her small cast. The man who played the Thin Kid is the last surviving member of the group some thirty years later. He is working with studio producers and directors on a reboot of the film and thinks about how impactful the original was on his life. It created who he is today.
The inner Horror Movie film is about a small group of kids who create a demon by torturing and abusing a fourth kid, the Thin Kid. They cover him with cigarette burns, chop off his finger, and force him to live in an abandoned school. The idea of the film is that the three kids are the real monsters and the audience is too by proxy. When the three kids unleash the Thin Kid on a party, the monster is out of control and ready to kill.
The making of the movie is fraught with obstacles. There are creative differences between the director and the filmography. The Thin Kid’s finger is accidentally chopped off (or is it? The narrator is rather unreliable). And Cleo is killed while filming her death scene. The movie is never released and the director is put on trial.
A decade later, the director is asking the actor who played the Thin Kid to push for the movie to be remade. She is trying to use the last of her sway on the world to get a cult following together for a movie that has never been released before she dies of cancer.
Halfway through the book, we learn that this is an audiobook the Thin Kid is narrating set in today’s world. He tells us much of the behind-the-scenes information associated with being a star in a movie that was never released. Strange things make us believe that the narrator may have taken on more of his character than he should have. He may have become a monster in his own right during the original filming back in the 90s.
Scoring
Character – ⭐⭐
The character of the Thin Kid and the actor who plays him isn’t developed enough to inform me of his motivations. I understand that he wants to become the monster and in a way does, but everything else about his backstory and persona is so wishy-washy that I don’t get a solid feel for his desires. Though for Cleo and Valentina, I believe we can infer more about their desires from the script (Cleo) and the narrator’s references to the movie’s directing (Valentina) than we can about the Thin Kid’s.
Setting – ⭐⭐⭐
The setting is rather undeveloped in this novel aside from the old school building Paul Trembly does a pretty good job of describing the school, which he should because it is a primary location. The script also describes settings and locations well, so I think this all comes out in a wash. Some setting work is great while some needed more exploration.
Plot – ⭐⭐⭐
There are parts of the novel when the narrator delves deeply into the psychology and philosophy of horror movies. These sections allow us to understand the importance of many inner-movie plot elements. The plot of the novel is the entire reason I picked it up. The narrator saying that the text is a transcription for an audiobook bugs me. It comes 140ish pages in (unless I missed something) and I don’t believe it adds to the story at all. Especially at the novel’s end when we are in the present tense. Are we to believe the narrator is actively recording himself on a handheld recorder? No. So how is the ending a part of the audiobook?
Form – ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
I like the use of movie script and dual narrative timelines. Especially after reading Magpie Murders which bungled the book-in-a-book form, this interweaving of script and narration is spectacular. We cut from the current timeline to the past timeline and then into the script in such masterful ways that I don’t question the reason for the switching. It feels right. Well done!
Quality – ⭐
I’ll give you that the quality improves later in the novel, but the first two chapters are a frenetic mess. I can’t understand how any editor would have let these chapters stay as they were. If I weren’t reading this for LTM, I would have walked away from the novel with a satisfying DNF (did not finish). For those two chapters alone I am giving this 1 star for quality.
Enjoyment – ⭐⭐x 2
I really wanted to love this novel, but I didn’t. The plot sounded great. I got excited listening to some publicity about the novel, but the first two chapters were so frustrating that I couldn’t get back into the story as much as I wanted. The unreliable narrator would have been something I loved reading if it weren’t for the negative parts of this novel. It just wasn’t there for me.
Conclusion & Video
Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay gets a composite score of 18 stars. As I described in my recent post, a saving score of 24 keeps you out of the maw of Voidy. Horror Movie doesn’t make the cut. The idea sounded great, the buzz excited me, but the novel didn’t deliver.
Have at it Voidy!
