Tom Becker’s Dark Room forgoes the supernatural romance trappings of YA genre fiction for a stab at the classic genre.
Horror aimed at a teen audience, especially in fiction as opposed to film, walks a razor’s edge. You can’t be too graphic with your violence, sexual themes, or language, but if you only brush with those subjects with no real commitment, the story can also loose its teeth. It’s an unenviable position for a writer to be in and Becker tries to straddle that line with some success.
The story revolves around teenage Darla and her father, a lifelong grifter, settling into the fictional South Carolina town of Saffron Falls, aiming to legitimately give themselves a fresh start. As soon as they cross into down, Darla begins receiving horrible visions of death. Saffron Falls has its own secret in the Angel Taker, a deranged killer who killed beautiful teenagers. Believed dead for twenty years, someone is picking up where the Angel Taker left off. Now, not only does Darla have to survive at a new school, but also the blade of a camera-obsessed madman after her and her newfound classmates.
Dark Room suffers the same problem as MTV’s recent television reworking of Scream. A very, very tight core cast of protagonists are fleshed out, yet most of the other knife-fodder characters receive only one or two small scenes to superficially establish who they are before they’re added to the body count.
While keeping with the slasher tropes of using a variety of archetypal teenage types is to be expected, not giving these characters, especially the “jocks” or “vapid beauty queens,” any real personality save for one potentially redeeming internal note given right before their death robs the reader of caring whether or not they live or die; thus removing a lot of the tension from the scene. Given that this book is geared towards a teenage audience, and therefore will be more akin to the relatively tamer slasher films of the late 90’s and early aughts (compared to their 80’s counterparts), it remains the most distracting problem with the book along with the excessive and almost unnatural use of the word “ain’t” by some characters.
That said, Becker spins the tale at a very brisk pace, never slogging moments down with too much exposition or excessive imagery, which works well given the age group at which the book tries itself. Fans of the slashers will feel quite at home with the story beats, including the fun in guessing who the killer really is, but won’t find anything necessarily ground breaking.
Due to the lack of fertile soil for YA slasher stories, the book provides some fun entertainment even if many of the characters are superficial.
This review is based off an advanced copy provided by the publisher. Dark Room will be released on September 10th, 2015.