How to Survive Your Murder (Danielle Valentine)

How to Survive Your Murder
Danielle Valentine
Razorbill
Fiction, YA Thriller
*+ (Terrible/Bad)

DESCRIPTION: Halloween night, partying teens, a corn maze in Omaha... if anyone recognizes the ingredients to a horror movie, it's Alice Lawrence. The high school junior is obsessed with slasher films, and she and her two best friends are even contemplating starting a podcast about survival lessons one can learn from the "final girl" survivors of Hollywood killers. That's why she doesn't follow her older sister Claire into the maze. But Alice never expected to see her own sister stabbed in front of her eyes among the cornstalks.
One year later, at the trial, a strange woman turns up, implying that maybe Alice didn't see what she thought she saw... that maybe the man on trial is not the real culprit. Alice has been hearing this throughout the hellish year since the worst night of her life, a year in which everything - her dreams of college, her family, even her seemingly-unbreakable friendships - all went to Hell. She knows what she saw, and who she saw. But when Alice hits her head in the courthouse bathroom, she wakes up on that terrible Halloween night - and, this time, she's in the corn maze with her sister. This time, the murder doesn't happen... but another girl dies.
Alice has until midnight to unravel the mystery of what really happened in that corn maze. If she succeeds, she may save the life of her sister, but if she fails, she goes back to the future where Claire is dead and her life isn't worth living. With a murderer stalking the streets of Omaha, she'll have to use every trick she learned from her favorite movies to stay alive - but movies aren't reality, and being the final girl may take more than Alice can muster.

REVIEW: This book wants to be a self-aware thriller in the vein of the Scream franchise (and numerous others), where a teen girl thinks she knows how to survive a horror movie situation only to discover that what looks easy when you're shouting at a character on a screen - Don't put down the knife! Don't go into the basement! Don't split up! Just run, already! - is much more difficult when it's you stumbling over bodies and stalked by a killer or facing the realization that the monster may wear a very familiar face. It really, wants to be that. But either this is an exceptionally meta take on that concept, or Alice really is too ridiculously stupid to be a final girl. I lost track of how many times she stood there, frozen, because fear flooded through her/locked her legs/killed her voice/fill in the descriptor to explain why she doesn't actually do anything useful, or anything at all. She also is a remarkably inept investigator (if what she does counts remotely as an "investigation"), not really thinking through any of the wild conclusions she leaps upon almost at random. I kept thinking of the opening sequence to the parody Scary Movie (the only remotely amusing part of that film, in my opinion), where the girl kept being presented with choices and always took the wrong one: finding a table full of weapons such as a gun and a grenade, she confidently grabs a banana, and when she flees and comes to a fork with signs pointing to Freedom and Certain Death, she hardly pauses before racing to the latter... only this wasn't a parody or an opening sequence, it was the whole of the book, as Alice repeatedly grabs bananas and keeps tripping on her way down the wrong path. The plot helpfully leads her around by her nose, a nose that's often practically pushed into solutions time and again that Alice refuses to see (in addition to freezing up at almost any stressor, she also adopts the winning survival tactic of closing her eyes, because anyone in a survival situation knows that what you don't see can't hurt you). The real culprit's obvious by the halfway point, and most of the distractions and jump-scares feel manipulative and telegraphed even to someone who doesn't watch a ton of slasher movies. There are numerous things that just plain don't make sense by the end, as well as a few last-minute twists that I won't get into for spoiler reasons but which dropped it to the rating it received.
(As a closing note, I still maintain that Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th was a much funnier horror parody than Scary Movie, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on.)

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