Cale Dietrich

Scream meets The Taking of Jake Livingston in this young adult horror novel by Cale Dietrich featuring a masked killer who targets frat boys. Freshman Alex believes that joining a fraternity is the best way to form a friend group as he begins his college journey. The frat he’s pledging seems welcoming and fun, and accepting of his identity as queer. It would feel better if Gray, the other queer frat boy was friendlier, but Alex can deal with that if it means being part of this popular group. And then... one of the frat boys is killed by a masked, knife-wielding murderer. The police and the university believe it’s random – a case of a drunk kid being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when another frat boy is murdered, Alex and Gray start to wonder if they might be the next targets, and if the pledge/hazing rituals have gone too far. Elements of horror, mystery, and a gay hate-to-love romance make this a story readers won't want to miss.

The Pledge

Geoffrey Froggatt

This book’s summary reminded me of Sorority Row (one of my favourite horror movies), only with frat boys and a gay protagonist. Sam is a college freshman recovering from the trauma of killing a masked killer in self defence. He's finally ready to move forward from the past and joining a fraternity seems like a path into friendship and reconnecting with the world. He sees college, and his new identity as a frat boy, as his best shot at living a life not defined by the killings. He starts to flirt with one of the brothers, who Sam finds is surprisingly accepting of Sam’s past, and begins to think a fresh start truly is possible. And then one of his new frat brothers is found dead. A new masked murderer, one clearly inspired by the original, emerges, and starts stalking, and slaying, the frat boys of Munroe University. Now Sam will have to race against the clock to figure out who the new killer is (and why they are killing) before Sam loses his second chance, or the lives of any more of his friends. I love how we immediately jump into the action of this book and how the prologue is essentially the opening scene of a slasher movie. This book is very much structured like a slasher movie like Sorority Row and Scream 2. I liked Sam as a main character and I love how he navigates trying to live a normal life in a true crime obsessed world. It was interesting seeing how callously people used his past as an interesting talking point or bit of gossip, and I think it was even worse with how Sam’s mom used Sam’s trauma as a vehicle for her book sales and writing career. This book did a good job at introducing a small cast of secondary characters that felt complicated and fleshed out before the killing starts. I like how the themes of true crime entertainment and survivor’s guilt is explored in this book. The first 80% of this book was strong, but it fell apart for me at the end. The killer reveal was not only lackluster, but it also fell flat for me because I didn’t remember who the character was, I almost thought it was a new character we’ve never been introduced to before. At first, I had two suspects for who I thought the killer was, and I thought both were cliché, but now I would have preferred either of them to who the killer was revealed to be. The motive makes sense but I just couldn’t get over how I didn’t remember the character at all and how much it ruined the reveal and the ending for me. Stories like this often rely heavily on the final quarter, especially the killer reveal and the ending, so the fact that both of those things were weak made the story have a sour taste overall, it just tainted everything that came before it. Overall, this was a fun slasher story with a queer protagonist, but it disappointed me only in the last 20%.

Absolutely loved it. Definitely did not think it was going to be who it was. 

The Pledge

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