Kill Creek

We don't listen to ourselves properly. To that voice inside.

Animals wouldn’t touch the house on Kill Creek with a barge pole, not even the chirping cicadas on the other side of the river.

"Something at the very core of his being told him not to open that door. But open the door he did."

It’s one of our flaws as human beings. Our stubbornness.

Kill Creek is a fresh take on the haunted house trope, with clear writing and interesting ideas.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." H.P. Lovecraft.

It plays on the cosmic horror concept of not knowing who or how the terror materializes, but instinctively feeling the threat in the background, ready to strike and do harm.

But you know those five-star experiences that go haywire by the end? This is one of them.

It had such potential.

A group of famous authors enter the tried and tested haunted house, with all the expected bumps, cold spots and whistles. But they’re a mixed bunch of generally unlikeable, stereotyped and ultimately bland characters.

👉 The overtly aggressive feminist.

👉 The morally confused Christian.

👉 The egomaniac entrepreneur… and so on.

Their purpose is to make sure their careers benefit from public interest, which makes them collectively shallow and disposable.

The story is drawn out by constantly mixing and matching character viewpoints that essentially experience the same thing. A gripping book in places that suffers because of too many retellings. 

There are also too many repetitive descriptions of unimportant events. Repeats are fine when describing core action, but not when talking about banal occurrences like coffee being poured or vodka top ups or another log being put on the fire. This is pointless filler and one of the reasons why generic output is boring to read, like an encyclopedia with reiterated bullet points. Get to the point, be concise and move on.

Or you can draw a book out into 550 pages if you want, making it at least 150 pages too long.

Chapters are predictable as you already sense what’s coming, forcing you to zip forward to new and more interesting terrain.

It’s still a four-star read at this point, but something very important clicked at 85% when I no longer cared about the outcome.

Does the evil house win or lose? It doesn’t matter.

And then the ridiculous ending!

I couldn’t hack it and rarely do I put down a thriller at 95%. Kill Creek goes from being a magical Shirley Jackson experience to a dumb slasher, with the H.P. Lovecraft vibes thrown away. Why go the slasher route? Lack of ideas?

For some reason I'm reminded of the excellent splatterpunk book, The Summer I Died by Ryan C. Thomas, or rather its terrible sequel, Born To Bleed and how it tries too hard to please and becomes predictable and unrealistic, loses the plot and drives for the mainstream Netflix slasher shelves.

The writing is mostly good but I couldn't figure out what I was reading by end, hence only three stars from me.