A Book Review - Camp Fear by Carol Ellis (Point Horror)

This is a really difficult one for me to review.

Rachel has a summer job as a counsellor at Camp Silverlake. For the first week, the camp is open to counsellors only as they prepare the place for the campers. Her fellow counsellors are an interesting bunch: three other girls and four guys from varying backgrounds, some of whom know each other from summers at the camp as children, others who are newcomers.

Things seem tense amongst some of the counsellors, and Rachel soon learns why: seven years ago, when five of them were campers, a boy died accidentally. There seems to be more to it, but Rachel doesn't know what. Soon nasty tricks start being played on the counsellors who were there that summer, and each one plays upon their worst fears. But who is doing it, and why?

I can't say that I actually liked the book. Yet I thought it was good. The writing was pretty smooth, as far as short teenage horror novels go. The horror mechanism - by which I mean the scary things that happened - was unique enough to hold my interest; scaring your victims by playing up to their fears and phobias is much more interesting than just slashing tires and leaving threatening notes. The characters were as deep as could be expected from a 200-odd page book aimed at teens that features eight main characters who all want page time, and none of them acted in a particularly irritating and / or unrealistic way, the way they seem to in a lot of books.

Why didn't I like it? It's hard to put my finger on a reason. It was sad, very sad. And lonely. Maybe it was the plotline, maybe it was the camp setting with its lack of tried-and-true friends and absence of parental figures. Either way, it wasn't a comfortable book for me to read. I like my teen novels set against a backdrop of familiarity: high school, parents, home, friends that the protagonist knows and trusts. Sometimes that trust is misplaced, but at least for most of the novel it's there. Camp Fear just left me feeling lonely and alone.

Possibly I should have left off a rating for this one. I've given it three stars within the context of teen horror, because it was written pretty nicely with an interesting plot, and I'm sure that not all readers are as emotionally affected by setting as I am.

Verdict: Bleak and sad, but worth a read.