#Spooktober ‘Prom House’ by Chelsea Muller

About the book…

What happens when the best night of your life turns into the worst? Full of menace and suspense, this is an unputdownable thriller–and a trade paperback original!

Ten people share a prom house at the Jersey Shore for the weekend. Every one of them has a secret . . . and when they begin to die one by one, panic ensues. Could somebody’s prom date also be . . . a killer?

Underlined is a line of totally addictive romance, thriller, and horror paperback original titles coming to you fast and furious each month. Enjoy everything you want to read the way you want to read it.

Published in paperback and e-book, in May 2021, ‘Prom House’ by Chelsea Muller is a Y.A thriller/horror tale in the vein of Point Horror or Goosebumps!

As I may have mentioned before when writing reviews of Y.A books, I am not the intended audience. I am reading for the thrilled teen in me who would have loved to have had access to these wonderful books. I also have 3 teens at home who I run things by to check for authenticity as I don’t speak, quite literally sometimes, the same language!

So bearing that in mind, I am afraid this book took me so long to read, even though it is a relatively svelte 256 pages, because I just didn’t care what was going to happen. I went right to the end because I held out hope for a resolution but there were quite a few plot points which made no sense. The characters were thinly sketched but the exposition was over done which made them feel super earnest as a result. By this I mean, you have a group of friends hiring the house of their dreams , for prom night, before they all go off to college. But each is a cipher-the jock, the gay couple, the nerdy girl with the crush on the boy she could never hope would look her way, and so forth-and so when each and every action/reaction is over written, it just adds a layer to a cardboard cut-out that will topple them into irrelevancy.

The main narrator, Kylie, is on edge as she has planned this party down to the very last detail. What she did not allow for, however, is natural forces beyond her control which would whip a storm that left her and her friends isolated, in an electrified moat (don’t ask) on a stretch of beach. Having already called the police after finding one of their number murdered, only for the corpse to disappear and 2 very incompetent cops appear to bawl them out, there is little chance of anyone coming out to rescue them when a second of them dies, or is murdered, or fell down the stairs.

The actions they take seem inexplicable, I read on, and on, and on, hoping for something to lift this story out of a pastiche, but nothing did. I am not, however, the target audience and what I may find dirge-like might be super exciting to someone else. Also, I have come off a run of really disturbing, very dark adult horror novels so perhaps the case is that my expectations were too high.

It would not put me off reading another novel by this writer, at some point in the future, but at the moment there are some thick horror novels giving me the side eye from my tbr pile …..

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About the author…

Chelsea Mueller writes gritty contemporary fantasy and thrillers for adults and teens. She founded the speculative fiction website Vampire Book Club and blogs about TV and romance novels for numerous websites.

She loves bad cover songs, good fight scenes*, and every soapy YA drama Netflix can put in her queue. Chelsea lives in Texas, and has been known to say y’all.

Links-http://chelseamueller.com/

Twitter @ChelseaVBC