This is a quick read for a number of reasons. For one, it's under two hundred and thirty pages, so it can easily be devoured in a single session. If it's not for you, then it'll be over before you know it. It shifts along nicely too, with teasers and cliffhangers to end chapters and press you into reading on even if it's three in the morning and you have to be up early. However, it's also reliant on its rapid pace in order for you to not notice the holes that pepper the story by the time it's all over and the grand reveal is done. Thinking back, I can see quite a few.

I have two fundamental problems with the book as against the story. For one, the cover looks like yet another James Patterson novel written by another hand, just one that the designer forgot to actually put his name on. It also has "a thriller" scrawled over the title to back that up, but it's not a thriller in that sense. This is a Christmas horror that's not entirely sure it cares about Christmas and isn't particularly sold on being horror either. The other problem I have is that the blurb on the inside sleeve is awful, possibly deliberately so. This is told from the perspective of Eddie Parker not Jessica Kane, as important as she becomes, and it explains a lot more than it should.

We begin in the small town of Old Forge in upstate New York, where Eddie is about to rob a couple of old and frail locals outside a convenience store. That's not a good beginning for him. Neither is the fact that Dorothy and George aren't as frail as they might seem, because the moment he goes for the former's purse with its wad of large bills, the latter gets up from his wheelchair and injects something into Eddie’s neck. Next thing he knows, he's waking up on the snow-covered ground on Main Street and everything's changed.

He soon discovers that it's Old Forge but not the real town. This is a recreation of Old Forge from a century earlier in 1936, with almost everything from the drinks in the bar to the phone on the wall completely fake. The town initially seems empty but he soon finds Trinity Jackson, who arrived in a similar fashion, and an unconscious girl on the saloon floor following a blow to the head. She's the Jessica Kane from the cover blurb and the pattern continues. Before long, they find Greg Fisher in neat fashion, another obvious setup that's something else, and some guy called Tank and we're in an obvious trope already, even before the mysterious killer stalking them all shows up to provide a second.

The most obvious example to cite of the "strangers wake up together in a restricted environment" subgenre of horror is 'Saw' rather than 'Cube', because while the why of it all matters, the what of it matters more. We gradually learn that this fake town is an open prison, completely surrounded by a wall topped with electrified barbed wire, and that all of them are there for a reason. Eddie's a thief and we discovered that in chapter one, but as we learn more about the other characters in here with him, we start to figure out the reasons why they're all there.

The 'Saw' comparisons continue because, fifty or so pages in, the first of them dies in a gruesome trap, inadvertently drinking acid from a communion wine bottle. These traps get more gruesome and more convoluted as they go, even venturing into the old school at points, more 'Dr. Phibes' or 'Theatre of Blood' than 'Saw'. If you've figured out some of the reason why this cast of characters is there, stumbling into traps, you'll have realised that they're not particularly sympathetic.

That makes the traps more important than the people, which is important for a slasher but not so good for a thriller, where we're supposed to care about the characters we're reading about rather than rubbing our hands in glee when the next one bites the dust. Only Eddie and Jess really elicit any sympathy from us, which means that we know very quickly that everyone else is just a redshirt waiting for their death scene. Eddie is a compulsive thief but he wants to quit and Barbara was his last target. Jess may have killed a wannabe-jock rapist at a party, which is understandable too.

Other influences show up too. Inevitably, there's 'The Most Dangerous Game', because someone's hunting humans here, even if we don't know who or why. When characters stumble onto an HQ, we find an explicit nod to 'The Truman Show' but I felt 'The Watchers' even more. Once we learn some rules of the game, 'Winterset Hollow' manifests as a comparison as well. Eventually, 'Dexter' gets a showing too. Given all these nods, I'm rather upset with myself that I didn't see the twist coming. After all, one crucial scene early on is an absolute giveaway if we see the reference, which I frickin' did but still didn't connect the dots.

I can't say I didn't like this because I did. I was caught up in the ride of it all, asking questions but a little less vehemently than I should have done because I was enjoying the traps and the deaths, as few of them as there are, and expecting certain things that I was set up to expect. It's a quick read but it's an easy one too and I fell into that. I liked the twist, too, when it happened; in one more of a series of magic trick scenes that set us up to emphatically think one thing only to promptly change into something else entirely, just like Eddie being injected in chapter one and Greg's introductory section not long after it.

The flipside of that is that, the more I think about that twist, the less it makes coherent sense. It's fair to say that it's there as much to pull the rug out from under us as it is to wrap up a story. What it does ends up feeling like the authors had to cheat a little to sucker us in deeply enough for it to work but, after the grand reveal, we have to realise that and fairly feel a little cheated. Now I have no idea what a better ending would have been, but I didn't write the book so I don't need to find it. James S. Murray and Darren Wearmouth, co-authors of a string of other novels, should have done. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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