Rave by author Konn Lavery
Thank you to author Konn Lavery for providing me with a copy of Rave in exchange for this honest review.
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Konn Lavery’s horror novel Rave does what few books can, it takes the traditional structure of a serial killer horror movie and translates it to a book without suffering from sluggish pacing. Slashers usually work best in a tight 80 minutes with a kill in the first 15, a slow down for a little plot, and then a bunch of kills in the last 20. Usually when a book or a television show tries to mimic the slasher genre they get really boring really fast.
Rave does not suffer from such weaknesses. It follows this structure well but instead of padding out the extra pages with dumb backstory about a haunted camp or mystery solving nonsense we’re treated to things like character development and relationship building. This is what movie slashers don’t have time for, they don’t often get us to care about the potential victims. Rave does, and this has a far bigger impact on whether or not the reader will be scared.
Rave is about a group of hard partying young adults in small town Canada. They’re getting ready for a drug fueled orgy in the woods on the anniversary of an infamous murder. Classic. Predictably, one of the partiers ends up dead. What isn’t predictable is everything that happens next.
I really enjoyed reading this horror novel and getting to know these characters. It’s a cast I haven’t seen a thousand times before. Including a less common love triangle between two women and a bisexual man! Way to flip the paradigm!
Rave still does contain many horror tropes and what in a different author’s hands could be called cliches. Lavery handles all of the staples like the harbinger, misdirects, and false safety scares with a loving grace that could only come from a true horror fan. As a huge horror movie fan myself I greatly appreciate this.
The reader will have to create all of the gore in their own minds but we are given some very cool psychadelic image pages after each murder. This adds an extra dimension to make Rave stand out even further from any other horror novel.
I love horror movies, huge gigantic fan, but I don’t actually read a lot of horror novels. Rave made me glad to take the risk. I suggest you do the same.
5/5 deer 🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌
For more indie horror check out Last Junction
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Buy it here: Rave
