It's easy for horror to overstay its welcome. The difference between a 90-minute horror movie and a 2+ hour one is, admittedly, a very thin dividing line, and suddenly the atmosphere, tension, and scares that worked so well as a carefully-kept 90-minute film suddenly become overbearing at the 2-hour mark. I'm suddenly checking to see how much time is left. Horror is a genre, I think, that demands precision more than anything else. And that's where Kill River falls flat. It had a winning hand: An '80s slasher (you don't have to ask me twice!) set in a water park (give it to me!!) – but at over 300 pages, it becomes too wordy, often stumbling over itself in what is extensively a very predictable story.

There's something about an abandoned, haunted, or otherwise Bad Vibes™ amusement park or water park that is just so incredibly my niche that I couldn't turn this down. Unfortunately, this book drags. It takes over 100 pages before we even get to the water park. So much time is spent on exposition, and delivered in a very linear model. 100 pages probably could've been cut if we got right to the action points and recounted the exposition through flashbacks, instead of following the protagonist through a sequential story. Taking an example from the beginning of the novel: instead of introducing your protagonist's resistance to going to summer camp, start with them at summer camp and then work backwards to explain why they really don't want to be there. I think so much of horror is about immersion, and it has to happen fast, or else the audience loses interest.

The characters themselves are archetypes, which I'm unbothered by in horror fiction that's modeled after film tropes. Friday the 13th was not giving us nuanced characters with depth and range! However, Kill River experiences what we might consider the Euphoria Effect™: that this story would become way less dicey if the character ages had just been increased by, like, three years. The characters in this book are all 13 or 14, which is wayyy too young for a slasher. It felt weird. The characters often read as 16 or 17, so I'm not sure why the ages weren't just upped? It's not too old to have your characters be 'coming-of-age'! My personal moral compass is that if they can't legally drive, maybe we shouldn't be creating horror scenarios for them. Chat, AITA?

I will say that the water park sequence has a very strong sense of atmosphere, and I believe that is Roubique's greatest strength on display. He's clearly thought through the map and overall vibe of the park, and that is translated very effectively. Once characters start disappearing, there was an initial intrigue that worked very well. But, as tends to be the case, once characters decide to split up, so too does the integrity of the writing. The action scenes are effective in places, and in others felt a little too Scooby-Doo-ish — having the killer chasing after the protagonist on a water slide felt a little adjacent to a Fun Park Phantom chasing after Shaggy and Scooby on a roller coaster. It's campy but not serious, and begs the question of "can this mf just die already?"

The prose itself reminded me of a Goosebumps novel: it's very approachable, but also left me wondering who this book was written for. The language invokes breezy Young Adult syntax, until the slasher action picks up in the final third and it suddenly becomes gory. The writing is very action-heavy with not a lot of character interiority. It's action-action-action-action-action, where we witness characters going from one part of the park to another, looking at one thing then another, but so rarely is that broken up with any sort of self-reflection in the character or information given by the narration. It felt at times like reading a play-by-play summary of a movie, not a text that takes the time to treat its characters or the context of the plot as fully as it could.

By the end, a sequel is set up and we don't really understand why any of the events in Kill River happened. Why was a killer picking off the construction crew in the park? No answer given. The discovery of the tapes left behind by one of the workers was a brilliant device that never went anywhere. The construction workers keep disappearing and they're starting to believe the park is haunted? That's interesting!! But the killer has no motive, he's just deranged. Oh, okay. My biggest problem in the park is that there's just... running water? Before the park is open? When no one is there? The water is just running? Did the killer know the kids were coming and he decided to turn on the water supply? Unsure. And then the final girl escapes and her parents' very logical response to their child almost being Water Park Murdered™ is to... ground them? Which, like, fair play if it's to keep them safe for a while, but it didn't seem like that's the way it was framed. I don't know. Girl, whatEVER.

Somehow there are two more books in the series. I will not be seated. I thought this had an excellent, excellent premise, but very slow pacing, plain prose, and underwhelming plot and character development made it feel like dragging your feet through deep water. Yes, you make it to the other side, but was there really no other way to get there?