#BookReview ‘Night Shoot’ by David Sodergren

About the book…

A group of desperate student film-makers break into Crawford Manor for an unauthorised night shoot. They have no choice. Their lead actress has quit. They’re out of time. They’re out of money.

They’re out of luck.

For Crawford Manor has a past that won’t stay dead, and the crew are about to come face-to-face with the hideous secret that stalks the halls.

Will anyone survive… the Night Shoot?

A delirious homage to the slasher movies of the 1980s, Night Shoot delivers page after page of white-knuckle terror.

‘Within the dank walls of Crawford Manor, secrets were given time to breathe. To atrophy. To fester.’

Currently available, along with other works by the author, on Kindle Unlimited, ‘Night Shoot’ is another independely published novel that holds no compunction with frightening the shit out of its readers.

I braced myself to read this after having The Haar in one of my Abominable Book Club parcels last year, and it fair blew my socks off( review here.). Here, we have a bunch of students needing to complete their degrees with an end of term film. The ‘director’, Robert, is an odious creep with delusions of grandeur and a wide streak of misogyny to boot, and the group has been put together by their professor. If any of them backs out, they all fail to graduate. High stakes indeed for Robert, who is obsessed with horror movies and bamboozling the easily confused nubile students into taking their clothes off.

‘Realistic? Who cares about realism? We’re making a horror film, Elspeth.Normal cinematic rules don’t apply. I don’t deal in reality.I deal in dreams and nightmares…’

They have one day-and one day only-at his rich uncle’s out of the way , Scottish pile, and have to vacate the premises by 8 p.m. That is all he will allow in repayment of a favour owed to Robert’s father, and they technically should be done by then. Except…it all goes horribly horribly wrong and the night shoot just might be the worst decision any of them ever made. Not all will make it till dawn…

I found it stomach churning in parts, the gore was bile inducing , the chauvinism exhibited by the male characters even more so, I was desperate for them to get their just desserts. The way they, and the one woman , bully the young student who offered, for free, to be in this ridiculous haunted house farce, is just odious. And when she inevitably up and leaves, they have no choice but to turn on the protagonist, set dresser Elspeth, and demand she takes her place. They pretend to leave , stealing Robert’s uncle’s spare keys they sneak back in and continue shooting. There was a very clear, very specific reason why they were supposed to leave by 8 p.m but honestly, as in every cheap and nasty slasher, they know better and lock themselves in the bloody mansion.

Literally, what else are you to think when your ancient, strange relative tells you not to try any locked doors and to leave by nightfall?

Lock all 7 of them in and unlock the doors like the most dumbass horror movie characters!

It shows David’s keen understanding of what constitutes-and what doesn’t-a scary tale and what people in peril do is so representative of everything you scream at the screen ‘Go Faster! Don’t drop that weapon! Make sure the villain is dead! Tell people where you are going! It’s always blood, that dodgy stain is always blood!’ And so forth.

And when horror doesn’t work, it turns into dirge which is why , with all his proselytising, Robert does not and cannot understand why horror movies work. Especially slashers . It’s not a matter of boobs, nudity and sex scenes, without a story to hold it together, or genuine acting, a film with millions of pounds in the kitty, or none,  will not get that blood racing and that flesh creeping.

I loved the sly humour, the cheeky asides littered throughout the story, the rending of flesh as important as the rending of characters. The nihilism matched the contrast between the film which was meant o to be shot, and the real life horror endured, as those you expected to die first , exceeded the tropes common to horror films, building to a crushing , but entirely sensical ending.

It’s a slasher movie , blessing freely onto a page, and whilst it went to very dark places, I went willingly.

About the author…

David Sodergren lives in Scotland with his wife Heather and his best friend, Boris the Pug.

Growing up, he was the kind of kid who collected rubber skeletons and lived for horror movies. Not much has changed since then.

Since the publication of his first novel, The Forgotten Island, he has written and published a further five novels, from slashers to gialli to folk horror to weird westerns. He is currently working on several more novels, including a trilogy of violent revenge stories to be published in 2022.

Links-https://paperbacksandpugs.wordpress.com/

Twitter  @paperbacksandpugs