I had no idea that ‘extreme haunts’ were a thing until I read this novel in which a team takes on the most extreme escape room of them all – Quigley House in Nebraska – a full-contact, (fake) blood-soaked, series of 5 cells with ‘actors’ in which contestants must find the hidden envelopes to progress without shouting the safe word ‘Reprieve’. Only one team has ever made it to the end and the big cash prize before.
You know the ‘Bushtucker Trials’ in I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here where the contestants get rained on with fish guts and offal trying to grub for stars in confined often dim or completely dark spaces – well this is that but the gore is all fake – still stinky though! The novel is set in 1997, but now, In real life, there are even more extreme versions in the US, such as McKamey Manor in San Diego (google it if you dare – but I was disgusted that people sign up to be effectively tortured – even though the guy who runs it claims it’s not – it is). And just in case you thought this kind of escape room is a US thing – you can do sanitised non-contact UK horror escape rooms, some with live actors, all around the country including going through an undistinguished doorway in Peckham! I am really glad that none of the UK ones I looked at go anywhere near as far as the US; H&S regulation and licensing wouldn’t allow it. I’m not so happy about them being suitable for tweens and teens – but I do know that 11-year-old boys love reading Stephen King…
Back to the book, but before I discuss the contents further take a moment to admire the blood dripping spredges of the limited edition hardback I bought when this book was first published in 2021. Ever since, I meant to read it for RIP, it’s taken 3 years.
Our contestants in this run are Victor and his fiancee Jane, Jaidee Charoensuk, a gay student from Thailand who came to the USA in search of the English teacher he fell for, and local Bryan making up the team. We begin with a murder though, when the team have made it through to the fifth cell, and a madman intrudes into the cell grabbing one of them and putting a knife to their throat. After this, Mattson builds up the story from the beginning charting the life stories of the key characters in parallel with the team’s progress through the cells, and inserting witness statements and trial transcripts between these threads too.
We meet quite a few other key characters. There’s John Forrester, who owns and dreamt up the house and Cory Stout his manager. There’s Leonard Grandton, manager of the local hotel where contestants are put up, who’s about to lose everything. And there’s Black teenager Kendra Brown who was displaced from Washington to the wilds of Lincoln Nebraska, where her mother relocates for them to move in with her sister Rae and Kendra’s cousin Bryan who’s moved into residence at uni. Kendra will be a key witness to everything. She was working at the Quigley House as a parking attendant, but went up to there when she heard something was going down…
It turns out that Reprieve is less of a horror-fest and more of a murder mystery, just having the horror setting. Also within that Mattson, who hails from Seoul originally, also uses his characters to explore racism, homophobia, and sex-tourism. Jaidee on both counts as gay and Asian, Bryan and Kendra as Black – all three standing out in whiter than white Nebraska of the 1990s, but also Leonard’s experiences in Thailand where John sends him on a vacation and he falls for a pretty sex-worker. But these themes for the most part rather peter out (I agree with Cathy’s review in this respect).
I did enjoy the novel’s construction which, having told us a murder happens at the beginning, then builds up the suspense nicely with the different formats. That worked really well, and would have been tauter yet had not the digressions into social issues added so many pages. It was a good choice for RIP though with those blood-dripped page edges!
Source: Own copy. Bloomsbury hardback, limited edition, 2021. 403 pages.
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I suppose this depends on one’s tastes and propensity for suspense involving torture – mental or otherwise – but I shouldn’t say I’d never read something like this, only that it doesn’t appeal right now! It does remind me of the US show Jackass and those masochistic Japanese TV programmes that Clive James and others used to show clips of on their shows, and those certainly put me off. 😬
Compared with what seems to go on nowadays, the Quigley House’s ‘actors’ with electric prods etc is actually fairly tame. I remember the Clive James Endurance clips!
Love that edition! I had totally forgotten I’d read this until I saw your post. It was fun!
I sometimes think the real horror story is how many books I own that I haven’t read and the length of time it takes me to get to them! Three years is pretty swift, lol. I love the blood-dripped edges and personally would do better with a murder mystery in a horror setting than real horror (I can’t deal with gore). It’s a shame the themes die out as I do enjoy a good theme. The US escape rooms sound dreadful, and I’m also glad we’re a bit more restrained here!
I’ve just found three horror novels by John Ajvide Lindqvist (he of superb vampire novel Let the Right One In) that have been in my piles far longer – maybe next year for them!