When the infamous father of horror writing, Mortimer Queen, passes away, his final will and testament gathers an eclectic group of individuals to his foreboding mansion. Among them is a select group of writers, personally invited to claim a piece of his coveted fortune. However, upon their arrival, the guests discover they’ve unwittingly agreed to play a sinister game: solving riddles in each room under a strict and unforgiving time limit. Failure to succeed comes with a terrifying consequence—the mansion itself will devour them.

As the game unfolds, it becomes disturbingly clear why most of the guests were summoned: none of them truly had Mortimer's best interests at heart during his lifetime. Blending the locked-room mystery genre with spine-chilling horror, Mallory Arnold delivers a gripping tale of revenge from beyond the grave, where even death cannot silence the desire for retribution.

#PoisonedPenPress #HowToSurviveAHorrorStory #MalloryArnold

As soon as I read the summary for this book, I jumped at the chance to read it. I mean, the whole “a group of people with secrets is summoned to a remote location where they start dying one by one, and make them all authors” premise is one of my favorite tropes ever. Plus, that cover? Amazing!

Unfortunately, this is yet another case of a great premise let down by poor execution. Especially on a technical level. As soon as I saw that this book was written in third-person present tense, I had a sinking feeling. It’s not that I dislike present tense on principle; it’s that I often find that authors who write in third-person present do way too much telling over showing. And that was certainly the case here. Also, the dialogue was poorly written, so many metaphors were cringy AF, the characters all felt like shallow, uninteresting caricatures, and the characters’ names made it hard to take the story seriously (the main characters’ surnames were Queen, Brown, Clay, Roach, Flowers, Plumage, Marsh, Grimm; is this a poor man’s Clue?). Another cringy misstep: introducing a gay man of color only to immediately kill him off. Like…seriously?

When I see a novel featuring a cast of writers, I expect there to be commentary on the craft and/or career of writing, the kind of commentary you can’t get from anyone other than an author writing about other authors. But in this book, most of the main casts’ careers as authors were almost irrelevant. Chester could have been a full-time YouTuber and Crystal could’ve been a model or Instagram influencer and the story would’ve been exactly the same. Not to mention, the way the book portrayed being an author as a career was downright unrealistic. Why does Crystal post risqué photos of herself on Instagram just because she’s an erotica author? When was the last time any reader paid attention to what an erotica author actually looks like? And having her editor tell her to have more sex in order to write better erotica? Barf. That's not how writing sex scenes works. And saying Scott, a New York Times-bestselling author, was voted one of the sexiest men alive? Please. I’m rolling my eyes so hard I’m in danger of straining my eyeballs. Plus, the ultimate message that Melanie just needed better life experiences in order to write a publishable novel was such a...naive take on writing and publishing that I'm shocked an author who has been through the meat grinder of the publishing industry would think that's a compelling message.

Horror is the one genre I expect to have atmosphere. Sadly, this book was awful at creating atmosphere. This is basically Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None rendered like a cheap slasher film. And with only a pale imitation of that story's catharsis.

I wish I had something nicer to say, but unfortunately, I can only end with this: even if you're a die-hard fan of And Then There Were None homages (like I am), this book adds nothing to the subgenre, and I can't recommend it.