What did you just read?

Spoilers.

The the premise is that horror slasher films (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Scream, Silent Night Deadly Night, Friday the 13th, My Bloody Valentine) are fictionalized and sensationalized accounts of real killings with the book's main characters being those real women that went through the real events. They have formed a support group and the book opens up with their monthly meeting as we're introduced to everyone. Soon they are all under attack by a foe or foes that knows their secrets.

It's bad.

It's real bad.

The first thing that goes wrong is Ersatz Heather Langenkamp (named Heather so there's no mistake) is an unreliable drug addict shitheel. That's a really really tacky thing to do given most of the other names are changed. Our main character (Lynnette) is the Silent Night Deadly Night survivor. She's a lunatic shut-in rocking a current year feminist agenda and you're in her head the whole way. At first I wanted to see if we were going to change POVs (we do not) and then I wanted to see if she was genuine or some kind of piss take or actually the villain in disguise. She has an emotional support pepper plant and at no point is anything in this book a joke or a wink. It's very Lifetime Original Movie melodramatic about sisterhood and women and stuff. The woman that does the reading sounds like she's in her 50s, smoked a little, talks slowly and fits the part perfectly in that her terrible delilvery goes great with the Oxygen Network style of the thing.The book is trying to do some meta commentary about men and violence through the lens of the slasher genre. None of it works. You don't get to show up and declare the whole thing is about men victimizing women and then do shit like retcon Not Pamela Voorheeses in to a man because it would fuck up your premise having a female killer. Nearly every character with a Y chromosome is a piece of shit. Lynn spends some time in police custody partway through and the cops are cartoonishly assholish. She's very worried about her pepper plant. It's named Fine.

At the 2/3rd's mark we don't have a villain. The story grinds to a halt so we can spend a chapter with the terminally ill wife of one of the Final Girls. It's very serious except we spent no time with her prior to this and very nearly zero time with her wife. I think it's Ersatz Laurie Strode? I'm not going back to look. Our girls fail to get her home from the hospice she's at and they leave her corpse in a public park. None of this is a joke or played for laughs. Keep thinking Oxygen Network. A dude wrote this even.

The villain is the son of the therapist that is running the Final Girl Support Group. He wants to destroy the thing his mother spent so much time on I guess Adam Lanza style. There's some other shit that happens but it's also bad. Fine the Pepper Plant survives. The book ends with the support group meeting again but this time they have a new addition - the son's Final Girl accomplice. She is worthy of the group's compassion becuase she's a woman.

I'm working on developing stubbornness as a reader (in this case listening) so I kept going but it was tough. This is like a D that occasionally dips down to F.

As the book begins we find ourselves in the modern day on a dirt road in the country being introduced to our cast of characters - students (librarians) at a magical library. Each was being taught by Father since childhood one of twelve different "catalogues." War, language, death, time, math, animals, prophecy, etc. Father has gone missing and the library is now closed to them. There's a bit of mystery as Father's adopted family seeks to unravel what happened to him and regain entry to his library. We get a couple other point of view characters as the story develops eventually tying everything together.

This is kind of a tough one to do a little book report on. It has some magical school tropes as well as some Lovecraftian elements but neither overpower the narrative. The story manages to oscillate between funny and serious many, many times. It's sometimes dark and violent but also sometimes light and fun. At maybe three different points I would have thought the story was at its climax only to see there were hours and hours of the audiobook left. This is Scott Hawkins first book. I don't think an experienced author would have made the same narrative decisions but a first timer swinging for the fences kept me well entertained. I listened to this on audiobook (just over 13 hours) and the woman who did the reading did a very good job.

The Library at Mount Char is like a solid B.

edit - the author just had his second book come out recently, Blacktail, which is a little bit Call of the Wild and a little bit mythical adventure but that it seem like something I was interested in.