Title: Ten
Author: Gretchen McNeil
Publish Date: September 18th 2012 by Balzer + Bray
Source: ARC from BEA
Buy it from: Amazon
Goodreads summary:
And their doom comes swiftly.
It was supposed to be the weekend of their lives—an exclusive house party on Henry Island. Best friends Meg and Minnie each have their reasons for being there (which involve T.J., the school’s most eligible bachelor) and look forward to three glorious days of boys, booze and fun-filled luxury.
But what they expect is definitely not what they get, and what starts out as fun turns dark and twisted after the discovery of a DVD with a sinister message: Vengeance is mine.
Suddenly people are dying, and with a storm raging, the teens are cut off from the outside world. No electricity, no phones, no internet, and a ferry that isn’t scheduled to return for two days. As the deaths become more violent and the teens turn on each other, can Meg find the killer before more people die? Or is the killer closer to her than she could ever imagine?
Review:
If you’re like me and haven’t read a single one of the infamous Agatha Christie’s works– no, not even And Then There Were None, which inspired Gretchen McNeil’s Ten– you will still be able to appreciate the creeptastic novel you’ll find in Ten.
Ten by Gretchen McNeil is horror done right. By that, I mean that it’s not a sensory overload of gory images. Instead, it’s suspenseful and terrifying. As a reader, I felt that I couldn’t trust any of the characters; not even the narrator. It made things even more tense. (And believe you me, there was one character I was desperate to trust. Sa-woon.)
It reads like a ticking clock. How many pages, I wondered as I read, until someone else dies? Because most of the things you want to scream at characters in horror books and movies don’t apply here. These characters try to contact the the police and the outside world. But they have been forcibly stripped away from it in the midst of a dangerous storm, on an island. There’s an almost tangible feeling of doom hanging over them.
The ending? Well, no spoilers, but I will say this: twists upon twists, and none of them contrived.
To sum up: Read this one with the lights on, folks.
