Is there much going on in the world? Probably not. I haven't been paying attention. In lieu of any actual noteworthy events going on, I am going to review another YA book I found at a library book sale for 50 cents.
The book in question is "What Waits in the Water", a 2017 young adult mystery/horror novel written by Kieran Scott. The book is set in contemporary times and follows a group of teenagers stuck in a "cabin in the woods" style scenario, with some adolescent melodrama included. The book includes hints of supernatural elements, and I will discuss those with spoilers later on. It was published by Scholastic Books, and that will also be important.
Hannah and her step-sister Katie are going to visit Hannah's long-term BFF, Jacob, at his parent's beach house on a lake in Michigan. His parents are gone for the weekend, leaving the kids alone. Hannah is mostly just friendly with Jacob, but she starts feeling jealous when Jacob starts flirting with her step-sister, who she has a sibling rivalry of sorts with. But what will happen when Jacob notices his friend Colin is paying attention to Hannah? This sets up the basic relatable part of the story, as the kids, along with other friends Alessandra and Nick, go shopping, eat pizza, and kid around. And then the mystery elements come up: a girl their age, Claudia, disappeared from the town a few months earlier, and the lake had a string of drownings in the past. And then they start seeing some type of mysterious shape in the water, and while swimming, they feel hands grasping at them...
Is the lake the home of some type of Loch Ness Monster? Or is there a more mundane explanation?
The book becomes more serious when Alessandra is dragged under the water, and the kids hide in Jacob's beach house, with the power out, and with a rapidly building tension and fear as the isolated group tries to figure out what is going on.
Spoilers! It turns out that there is no lake monster, and that the seemingly supernatural happenings were caused by Colin pulling a series of pranks, with the help of Alessandra and others. And it also turns out that Colin is a jealous obsessive who was behind the disappearance of the girl earlier that summer, and he is trying to isolate Hannah, and that he is willing to commit more murders. The last few chapters of the book abandon the sense of suspense to turn into an action/chase sequence through the woods, and which abandons some of the realism to turn Colin into an "unstoppable slasher" figure. The denoument of the book has Colin imprisoned, and Hannah and Katie learning the value of sisterhood, and the surviving members of the friend group learning a valuable lesson. Or learning something.
While reading this book, I went through a series of impressions. At first, it seemed like a pretty serviceable, if not original, mystery novel. After the first real action, when Alessandra seemingly disappears into the water, I almost stopped reading, because the dialog and pacing became unbearably artificial and unrealistic. Trapped in a house without electricity, and having seemingly witnessed someone die, Hannah and Katie spend a few pages nastily scolding each other over their romantic rivalries. Hannah has also found the diary of Claudia earlier, but instead of reading it or discussing it with friends, uses this downtime to read a mystery novel. Some of these breaks from reality make sense in terms of the tropes of mystery and horror, (Like not tying up the unconscious killer), but others are just failures in characterization. After I powered through that section, I found the climax of the story actually tense and exciting---the author had managed, using whatever secret sauce goes into these type of things, to create an air of fear, anticipation and excitement, as she concluded the mystery. So as a reader, my experience was mixed. An exciting plot, with a failure of characterization.
But now I am going to say why this is all important, and not just about whether a 46 year old man was properly entertained by a YA mystery novel. My biggest problem with this book is that it misses the adolescent experience, and thus, misses the horror that comes with it. As mentioned, this was published by Scholastic Books, and I imagine they have pretty strong editorial standards, and so we end up with teenagers that act more like middle-schoolers. They like pizza, school sports, and kissing. As I mentioned long ago, despite them being alone in a beach house with no adults around, they can't get close to a joint or a hard nipple. And it might seem normal to have some content guidelines for a YA book, but this book is based around sexual violence. During the climax of the book, Hannah find's Nick's dead body with a slashed throat, and Colin's interest in her is clearly based around sexually possessing her. So this book allows detailed descriptions of dead bodies, and structures its plot around the idea of sexual assault, but doesn't allow normal depictions of adolescent sexuality or experimentation. And I don't just object to this on social or political grounds, but because it takes away from it as a horror story. It starts with characters who act like bland middle-schoolers, and later jumps to them in an over-the-top action movie complete with gore, but doesn't describe the anxiety and frission that comes with being an adolescent in a way that can build real suspense. I can't blame the author for that, since that is probably a matter of editorial standards, but the story suffers because of it.