SYNOPSIS
Ash is stranded at a rural horror film festival about a giant killer cicada and can’t decide what’s worse, the movie or her idiot boyfriend, until she realizes she’s starring in the bloody sequel when people start dying and the locals won’t let them leave.
REVIEW
For the fourth time, the Killer VHS Series, delivers the gory, creepy goods with Cicada, the giant monster story I have been waiting for.
This has so many things that I love. All the references to nu-metal took me right back to high school. There’s a creepy small town with dark secrets, strange coincidences that build the creep factor. Then you throw in a gigantic people-eating cicada and what you get is a recipe for fun, terrifying, gross out horror.
Tanya Pell breathes so much life into these characters, you’ll feel like you spent a thousand pages with them instead of one hundred and sixty six. Whether you like them or not, there’s no denying their depth. Ash enters this novel in a shell of a relationship, exuvia if you will, with a gaslighting POS of a boyfriend. Like the titular Cicada, we watch her shed her shell and really come into her own.
The town is very well developed, immediately giving the reader the sense that something is off. Everyone we meet in this town is distinct and memorable, Pell establishing the characters quickly and efficiently. Welcoming at first, Pell cleverly drops all sorts of red flags that build the tension and add to the eerieness of the whole town and situation.
Wonderfully drawn characters, tension for days, and a giant monster that deserves to be mentioned among the great, Cicada is a great VHS style throwback to the monster movies of yore. Adding depth and great character development that is usually missing from these types of stories, Tanya Pell has created a new final girl in Ash that I would put up there with Nancy, Sidney, Laurie and Jade.
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