I’ve had this book parked on my TBR forever, and after SADIE vaulted Courtney Summers into my “auto-read, no questions asked” tier, THIS IS NOT A TEST became the lone holdout I hadn’t tackled. Consider that streak broken—and absolutely worth the wait. In its newly revised, expanded “director’s cut” (paired with the novella PLEASE REMAIN CALM), this cult-favorite teen horror lands like a punch to the ribs: spare, intimate, and quietly devastating.

Yes, there are the walking dead clawing at the doors, but Summers is less interested in splatter than in the ache that settles when the screaming stops. We’re locked inside a high school with six teenagers who are terrified, prickly, and—crucially—alive. At the center is Sloane Price, whose life before the outbreak was already a battlefield. She’s not the plucky final girl; she’s someone who, when the world collapses, isn’t sure she wants to go with it. That perspective flips the familiar survival narrative on its head. The horror isn’t only what’s outside; it’s the numbness inside, the throb of old bruises, the way grief sours your sense of a future.

Summers’ first-person voice is lean and surgical, cutting past melodrama into the raw nerve of each moment. She captures the stasis of siege so well—the long, empty hours when nothing happens and your thoughts get loud, punctured by bursts of panic where choices calcify into consequences. The group dynamics are a powder keg: shifting alliances, clumsy mercy, pettiness that looks monstrous under fluorescent lights. No one here is a “type”; even the characters you want to shake end up complicated, bruised by what they’ve lost and what they’re willing to do to keep breathing.

What I loved most is how the book makes terror feel honest. The undead rarely hog the frame; they loom. That restraint gives the story a slow, suffocating dread. You hear them more than you see them; you feel them in the way everyone flinches at a hinge. And when the violence does break through, it’s quick and deglamorized—consequence, not spectacle. Summers threads through themes of sisterhood and abandonment with care, letting Sloane’s history with Lily haunt every decision without turning trauma into a plot gimmick. Content notes are warranted (domestic abuse, suicidal ideation), but the handling is empathetic and precise.

The “director’s cut” pairing with PLEASE REMAIN CALM is a gift. Without spoiling anything, the novella widens the lens, pushing beyond the claustrophobia of the school and testing what survival means once the walls are gone. It has a different energy—sinewy, propulsive—and it makes the original novel feel even larger in retrospect, like you’ve stepped outside a locked room and discovered an entire city built around it.

If you’re here for pure gore, this won’t be your speed. If you’re here for a character study with teeth—about the maddeningly human way we cling, withdraw, confess, backslide, and still somehow choose each other—this is catnip. The setup evokes a detention-room microcosm transformed into a siege, but the book’s power is in the micro—the awkward apologies, the brittle jokes, the half-measures we call courage. Summers writes teenagers like actual people, not quip machines or moral lessons, and that’s what makes the high-stakes beats land: you recognize them.

As a longtime Summers fan, I’m thrilled to say this absolutely holds its own alongside SADIE while being a completely different beast—quieter, more internal, and, in many ways, more haunting. It’s the rare horror novel that lingers not as a jump scare but as an echo, the kind that finds you days later when you’re washing dishes and you suddenly remember a line, a look, an unclosed door.

Bottom line: bleak, beautiful, and unshakable. A modern YA horror classic that earns every one of its cult credentials.

A very huge thanks to NetGalley and Bindery Books for sharing the ARC of this already-cult teen horror with me in exchange for my honest review—and for finally giving me the nudge to cross Courtney Summers’ last unread title off my list.