Horror Movie -- A Brief (Book) Review of Paul Tremblay's Latest

Cover Image courtesy of
William Morrow

 Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay is one weird book, the kind that deserves a bit of serious contemplation after all is said and done, a true example of what some people like to call elevated horror. Horror Movie is only my second Paul Tremblay book, the first being The Pallbearer's Club, and this story has similar vibes. It cleverly tells the story of a young group of post college age adults who set out to make a low budget horror film, and our narrator is the man behind the movie monster mask thirty years later. He's only known to us as The Thin Kid.

The Thin Kid is our narrator for reasons. He's about to embark on a journey to make a "reboot" of a film that was never officially completed but had become a cult hit from leaked footage online. So what we get is three different narratives; our kid retelling the past during the shoot, then him revealing bits of the present and where the major players of the movie are now (including himself), then finally the horror movie itself as written in the form of the screenplay.

It's a slow and creepy unraveling of events as told by an unreliable narrator, and it's full of triggering topics including suicide, body horror (as in Pallbearers Club), bullying and ostracizing. Thematically, it touches on identifying the monster behind the mask, how those monsters just might be a reflection of ourselves in some ways, or how we as a society just might be responsible for creating the things that we fear.

It can get confusing with all the story jumping from the Then to the Now, plus a screenplay that feels like it would get thrown in the DNF heap if it was an actual real live submission (I've read a lot of screenplays, so I'm a little biased on this point). BUT this was a low budget horror shoot from a young writer character, so in that context, I need to give the script part of it some leeway. The plot twists show up through the last half of the book, and man are they some crazy, confounding and heartbreaking plot twists.

I want to thank Mr. Tremblay and William Morrow for approving ARC access via NetGalley. Look for it at all major and independent book retailers.