Reprieve

August 9, 2021
Mattson (The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves) returns with the smart and harrowing story of a killing at a haunted house. In 1997, Victor Dunlap, a bank manager who used to teach English in Thailand, agrees to participate in a full-contact escape room–style challenge at Quigley House in Lincoln, Nebr. His four-person team includes his fiancée, Jane Roth, who is obsessed with Halloween but finds being handcuffed, shocked, and muzzled with electrical tape by the haunted house’s staff to be a bit too much; and Jaidee Charoensuk, a university student whom Victor had taught in Kanchanaburi, and who sought Victor out in the U.S. because he had a crush on him. The house supplies a fourth teammate, Bryan Douglas, a Black university student whose throat is slit in the house by Leonard Grandton in front of the others, who initially think it’s part of the act. Leonard had developed a friendship with the man who owns Quigley, before becoming needy and erratic. The tense, well-paced story—meted out in snippets of courtroom transcriptions during Leonard’s trial and chapters from various characters’ points of view, including Bryan’s cousin Kendra, who recently moved to Lincoln from Washington, D.C., and whose friend back east was concerned about her “managing all that white”—gradually reveals thematic connections as everyone grapples with understanding why Bryan was killed. It adds up to a canny use of horror as metaphor for themes of guilt, race, and sexuality. (Oct.)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that one of the characters works in Lincoln, Nebr., and misattributed a line of dialogue. This review has also been updated for clarity.

August 1, 2021
An interactive haunted house is the proving ground for several self-deluded characters. From the outset of this novel, set in Lincoln, Nebraska, circa 1997, we know that Leonard, a 37-year-old hotel manager, is on trial for murdering Bryan, a participant in a staged horror experience. Excerpts from the trial transcript and chapters named for the "cells" marking the progress of the deadly game create a structure for this study of misplaced and/or unrequited love. John is the impresario and puppet master of Quigley House, a "full-contact haunt" that has attracted a nationwide though decidedly niche fan base. Kendra, a new Quigley employee, is a 15-year-old girl still reeling from her father's recent death. Playing on her neediness, John manipulates Kendra into persuading her cousin Bryan to join a team that will endure increasingly grisly challenges in hopes of winning $60,000. The other team members are Jaidee, a Thai exchange student at the University of Nebraska; Victor, who was his English teacher in Thailand; and Jane, Victor's fiancee. Jaidee, who came to Nebraska to find Victor, who he thinks left coded love messages on his homework assignments, is also Bryan's roommate. Although participants in Quigley House tours often end up with minor injuries and PTSD, the experience is not supposed to be life-threatening. Danger can always be averted by uttering the safe word, reprieve. Not this time, though, and the true mystery here is why? This is a worthy attempt at a complex psychological thriller, but it fails to stick its landing. The characters' motivations are often opaque, and their behavior sometimes defies logic, particularly when life-altering decisions are at stake. The plot developments building to the climax will occasion much head-scratching. Despite some haunting scenes, a frustrating read.

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Starred review from August 1, 2021
Mattson (The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves, 2017) presents a brilliant hybrid, a thought-provoking look at marginalization and systemic oppression expertly nestled inside a high-anxiety tale about the horror industry itself. Readers enter at the end of the nightmare, at a 1997 murder trial in Lincoln, Nebraska. The crime happened in Quigley House, an infamous, full-contact haunted house attraction, when a team of four contestants attempted to win thousands of dollars. After each interlude of court documents or descriptions of that evening, the story moves to longer, more character-driven chapters, where three of the key players in this large cast--Kendra, a Black teenager new to Nebraska, Jaidee, a gay Thai college student, and Leonard, a local hotel manager--tell their stories, including the months leading up to the fateful night. Severely unsettling at every turn, the book alternates the unrelenting tension of "the real world" with the in-your-face terror of the haunt, meaning there is no reprieve from the fear. This is a rare treat of a novel that will be devoured by fans of pulp horror titles like The Dark Game by Jonathan Janz (2019) and by those who like the juxtaposition of supernatural and real-world horrors found in the works of Victor LaValle.

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