Book Review: Kill Creek by Scott Thomas

Four horror authors agree to spend the night in a haunted house as part of a publicity stunt.

"They were human minds set into paper, and Sebastian loved every single one of them, even the ones he considered disposable."

Let me get one thing straight - if I needed a horror book to scary in order for me to enjoy it, I would not be a horror fan. I can count on one - maybe two hands - the number of books that have actually scared me (Pet Sematary, Summer of Night, The Exorcist, Naomi's Room, to name a few), so it's actually a rare occurrence that a book will actually unsettle me. However, if I'm going into a book expecting to be scared or wanting to be - as a lot of previous reviews had hyped up - then yeah, I will be disappointed if it doesn't deliver. But as we've found time and time again, what one person finds scary, another will not. And that's fine, that's all part of reading, we all have different personal experiences that we bring to the table each time we venture into a new book. So in this instance, not being scared WAS a letdown for me, but this is not the case for all horror books I read.

Kill Creek is still a pretty enjoyable read, it's well-written and almost reads like a movie (which I've seen a few criticise), but I don't find that off-putting. If anything, it being written in that way makes it easy to binge and breeze through about 50-100 pages without even realising it. One of my favourite aspects of this book was the interactions and conversations between the four horror authors. It was so interesting that all four wrote such different types of horror and their discussions around horror and the publishing world were probably the highlights of the book for me!

I did have an issue with how the female author, TC Moore, was written. She had a chip on her shoulder from the get-go and came across as this really cold, distant woman who had to be this way in order to thrive in this male-dominated field. It just felt very stereotypical to me and I didn't appreciate it. She was overly sexualised and actually listed "fucking" as one of her essential activities. Oh, and she enjoys writing naked. Of course. I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination, I am a Barker fan for heaven's sake, where sex literally oozes from the pages! But in this instance, it didn't work for me, I wanted to like her because she did have some badass qualities but overall it felt like a cliche "female-written-by-a-man" character.

As I was reading and enjoying certain parts, I just kept getting that niggling feeling that something was missing? I needed something more. A bit more bite, perhaps. I'm looking forward to the adaptation for this, because I get the impression that it might be more chilling to see the events described on the screen as opposed to reading about them. 3 stars.

Johann

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