REVIEW: Come Out, Come Out, Whatever You Are (book) by Kathryn Foxfield

Come Out, Come Out, Whatever You Are is a YA mystery/thriller disguised as a horror story. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Lex is one of five teens who have signed up to be part of the newest (and possibly last) season of the reality TV show It's Behind You. The show's contestants must spend the night in a supposedly haunted location. Whoever is able to stay there the whole night wins 10 grand - and if multiple people manage to stick around, they have to split the 10 grand, so it's in contestants' best interests if there are fewer winners.

This season is taking place in the Umber Gorge Caves, the home of the Puckered Maiden, a ghost who takes the hearts of her victims. It's debatable whether she actually exists, but people have definitely died in these caves. The most recent death was only two years ago, a local teen killed during a cave-in.

Lex doesn't believe in ghosts and figures she'll get the 10 grand, easy. However, her fellow contestants - Python the YouTuber, Marla the wannabe actress, Abbie the ghost hunter, and Liam, the local boy who for some reason is pretending he isn't local - all have something they're hiding, and one of them may be willing to kill to keep others from finding out their secrets.

The cover makes this look like horror, right? I went into this expecting something like the movies Haunted Asylum and Grave Encounters - a group does a ghost hunting reality show that turns supernaturally deadly. Instead, this was more of a thriller/mystery that didn't really have anything in the way of creepy moments or scares. 

I'd previously read Foxfield's Good Girls Die First and thought it was so-so. Although I liked this book about the same (or maybe a tiny bit more?), I felt that it did better by its characters, at least some of them. They weren't necessarily just "the annoying one" and "the jerk" all the way through, and I actually came to sort of like a couple of them.

The ending was, unfortunately, cartoonish to the point of reminding me of a Scooby-Doo episode. Also, although everything technically got resolved, the story felt more like it came to a stuttering halt than a satisfying close.