REVIEW: Slender Man by Anonymous @harpervoyagerus #allthebookreviews
Slender Man
by Anonymous
Thank you to Harper Voyager for this bound manuscript copy for review.
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Publish Date: October 23, 2018
Paperback
336 Pages
Genre: Horror, YA
Lauren Bailey has disappeared. As friends at her exclusive school speculate and the police search for answers, Matt Barker dreams of trees and a black sky and something drawing closer. Through fragments of journals, articles and online conversations, a figure begins to emerge - a tall, slender figure - and all divisions between fiction and delusion, between nightmare and reality, begin to fall…
My Review:
I have been fascinated with the Slender Man phenomenon for quite some time. It's amazing how something that started as a contest turned into something oh so real for some crazy individuals... resulting in murder, cult like following and just plain paranoia.
Recently watched the Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story and so far it's my favorite film re SM. Deliciously creepy and I highly recommend. I was hoping to get that same creep factor in this book but alas, it is YA Horror - though even some YA Horror can give me the chilly bumps. This book took just a little too long to get into the meat of the main part. I realize this is pretty much how the phenomenon happens in these Slenderman sightings to straight crazy journey... I just wanted more SM!!
I loved the way this story was told via different types of entries, interviews, whats app messaging, articles, etc. It made for a quick, entertaining and fascinating read. Ultimately I knew I as going to like this before I even turned the first page.
If you're a lover of Slenderman and have been following this phenomenon in any capacity, I think you're going to enjoy this read.
★★★★
Recently watched the Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story and so far it's my favorite film re SM. Deliciously creepy and I highly recommend. I was hoping to get that same creep factor in this book but alas, it is YA Horror - though even some YA Horror can give me the chilly bumps. This book took just a little too long to get into the meat of the main part. I realize this is pretty much how the phenomenon happens in these Slenderman sightings to straight crazy journey... I just wanted more SM!!
I loved the way this story was told via different types of entries, interviews, whats app messaging, articles, etc. It made for a quick, entertaining and fascinating read. Ultimately I knew I as going to like this before I even turned the first page.
If you're a lover of Slenderman and have been following this phenomenon in any capacity, I think you're going to enjoy this read.
★★★★
Jessica's Review:
I’ll start off by saying that I can see this not being for everyone. The style of writing includes many forms – journal entries, interrogation transcripts, social media, emails, recordings, and more. I think that all of these combined made a compelling story and helped illustrate the wide reach that this entity can have.
Matt Barker is an outcast at a prestigious private school in New York. He keeps to himself mostly and no one at his school knows that he’s actually really close friends with one of the more popular girls, Lauren Bailey. They both have kept their friendship between them and they enjoy having this secret. Matt knows Lauren better than any of her other friends, like the fact that she loves Creepypasta and all of those obscure horror stories.
One day Matt finds out that Lauren has gone missing. CCTV footage shows her walking out of her apartment building at 3:14am and she just simply disappeared. Where did she go? What happened to her? The entire school is in a frenzy trying to find this out. Matt decides to log into her iCloud account to see if there are any recent photos taken while she’s been gone, but instead he finds a deeply buried folder with some seemingly normal photos of landscaping around New York. That is until he looks harder and notices, just out of frame and hiding in the shadows, a dark figure with a long body and angular limbs with a pale face. He shares them to a subreddit and everyone is loving the new photoshopped Slenderman photos – but are they fake or was something following Lauren?
Nightmares begin to plague Matt and all of them wake him up screaming at 3:14am. Not knowing whether he is truly awake or still dreaming, the author portrays his terror in the form of recordings on his phone. I know a lot of people won’t like these different methods but I think this did a great job capturing the raw fear that he was feeling. The dialogue felt authentic and on par with how disorienting it can be when you’re truly scared. I think the author did a great job capturing how a belief in something can overtake your life. Like everyone warned him, once you let him into your life there’s no getting rid of him, and he will eventually come for you.
I give this 5/5 stars
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