by Natasha Rhodes
2005, Black Flame
A rock singer in LA has a premonition of a collapsing basement rock venue. After her and a handful of others escape the tragedy, they begin to die off one by one in gory spectacles from convoluted, Rube Goldberg like accidents...is what would have happened in a proper Final Destination novel.
Instead we get 406 pages of the author doing her darndest to not deliver on the formula. I only made it two thirds of the way, in which we get three deaths. First dies of an explosion off page. The second has a brief Rube Goldberg set up, only to get a swerve and someone else dies from mundane failing brakes. Unpredictable enough, except the third death does exactly the same thing.
The death traps work in the movies by building suspense from each step being laid out, the inevitability of the execution, and the gory aftermath. Here we get none of that. The setups are constantly interrupted by cutting away to small talk, to the point I forgot someone was supposed to die. For the third death, a full 17% of the book went by between the set up and the execution, almost all of which was teenage idiots repeating things back and forth to each other.
I appreciate the challenge the franchise has with how to fill time between death scenes, which would be even worse in print, but this has some of the worse padding I've ever seen outside of a Fanthrorpe novel, down to the narration adding "really, really" to adjectives several times.
Currently not available anywhere on the internet, and you couldn't afford it if it was. Try the fan audiobook from The 80s Slasher Librarian.
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