What at first glance sounded like a straight-forward 'horror at the carnival' story evolved into a journey through most well-known horror genres, including aliens, zombies, werewolves, vampires and more. We follow a group of high-school kids as they visit the Halloween carnival that has come to town, and once they enter the house of horrors, the true nightmare begins as they have to fight for their lives against very real monsters.
While I was truly impressed by the elaborate plot and the construction of the horror house, once people entered it I was not that surprised anymore. Each scenario felt predictable and stereotyped like a copy of some well-known novel or movie. At first, I was overwhelmed by the multitude of characters and struggled to distinguish them from each other, though later on I understood that the story required a lot of 'cannon fodder', while some main characters remained. In the end, the book felt like a collection of loosely connected short stories covering the top horror genres.