Camp Weekend Ween Wrap-Up

 Hello Interwebs!

So I finally finished the last book for my definite Camp Weekend Ween TBR so I'll do a review of all three books together in a single wrap up post since all three books were novellas. There were four prompts and I read three novellas for those prompts. The four prompts were:

1. Read a book with a green cover (to match a forest)
2. Read a book with a group of teens as the main characters
3. Read a slasher, thriller, or horror book
4. Read a book with a camp setting

So I read three books which fit into the four prompts easily. They were: 

1. The Tent by Kealan Patrick Burke: a book with a camp setting; a slasher, thriller, or horror book
2. Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones: a book with a group of teens as the main characters; a slasher, thriller, or horror book
   
3. Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge: a book with a green cover (to match a forest); a slasher, thriller, or horror book
   

So I enjoyed all three books I read for this readathon and although I managed 2 of the three before the weekend was up I did not finish the third until after midnight on November 2nd. As always after the photo from the first book there will be spoilers. 

So The Tent is a novella about a family lost in the forest during a storm which destroyed their tent. The husband and wife are on the verge of divorce and are with their 12 year old son. While walking through the forest the son suddenly disappears and while the parents are looking for him they come across a tent in the middle of a clearing surrounded by strange "bushes". Upon investigation the pods are full of bones and other detritus, which are likened to owl pellets. As he investigates the wife approaches the tent and when it opens it is revealed to be a creature, the tent top being wing like appendages with a small parasite at the bottom. The wife is killed and consumed by the creature and when the husband fights back he knocks the creature back revealing a pit which he falls into the bottom of it, impaling himself on a rock spike above the immature creatures in the bottom of it. After the death of the parents, the boy walks out of the woods with a strange backpack on his back when a man at the campsites approaches him he realizes the backpack is impaling the boy and then he is infected by the creature. The story ends with the people from the campsite infected by this parasitic creature and leaving the woods to presumably infect the general population. I read this book in a single sitting on October 29th and gave it a 4 star rating. It was a good story, creepy and dark and while it definitely isn't a new favorite and I definitely liked the other book I read by him, Sour Candy, a lot more. I am definitely not disappointed by this choice to read for this readathon. 

The second book I read for this readathon was Night of the Mannequins by Stephen Graham Jones which is a novella I've had on my kindle for quite a while but hadn't read yet. This is about a group of high school aged friends who decide to play a prank on one of the girls in the group by sneaking in a mannequin with them to the movies where she works. But then at the end of the movie the mannequin gets up and shuffles out with the rest of the crowd. The narrator is shaken by what he thinks he saw with the mannequin walking out and is convinced its a bad omen. Then the girl who worked at the theater is killed along with her family when a truck smashes through her house and he is convinced that the mannequin is coming for them all one-by-one. To spare the families of his friends he decides he has to kill the rest of them before the mannequin comes for them and kills them and their families. Each of the deaths occurs with the movie from the initial incident involved in the background. As the killings continue he gets a mannequin like mask and becomes Manny (which is what they named the mannequin as kids) at the end with the death of the last friend it is revealed that the girl from the car accident didn't actually die in the accident and confronts him and he loses the remainder of his grip on reality and enters the lake to placate Manny and presumably commits suicide. This book ended up being much different than I thought but I really enjoyed it. I didn't enjoy this as much as My Heart is a Chainsaw by the same author but this book was still very enjoyable and cements Stephen Graham Jones as one of my favorite authors. I read this book from October 29-30 and gave it a 3.5 star rating. 

The final book I read for Camp Weekend Ween was Dark Harvest by Norman Partridge. This book takes place in a nameless town and is narrated by a nameless omniscient narrator who addresses you as someone who has insider knowledge of the events. You primarily follow a 16 year old named Paul who is participating in an event called the run where boys 16, 17, and 18 pursue a monster known as the October Boy from dusk to midnight or until the October Boy is killed. As you go through the book you start with the creation of the October Boy in a cornfield outside of town where vines have grown up a frame into clothes to make arms and legs and a body and a man carves the jack-o-lantern for his head and stuffs him full of candy before giving him a butcher knife and leaving him to fight his way to the church. As the story goes on you find out that the winner of the run is the only person allowed to leave this town, his family gets money and no bills for a year as well as a new house and car. The boys are starved for days leading up to it and the food sources are guarded so they want to kill the October Boy for the food inside his body. The only way for the October Boy to win is to reach the church and step inside before midnight. From adults' reactions you get the impression that this ritual with the October boy repeats every year to keep the town going as it is but I was still surprised when Paul figures out that the October Boy is the winner from the previous year who is killed immediately after the run is won and is buried with the seed to grow into the next year's October Boy. Paul decides the only thing to do is to escape with his friend Kelly and his sister Kim but ends up running into the October Boy by the church. After a confrontation with the cop he and Kelly help the injured October Boy into the church, where they find the boy's father who had been left to stop him if he'd gotten that far but had killed himself instead. Having won the run at long last the October Boy lets Paul and Kelly leave out the back and confronts the cop again himself and kills him in the same way the cop had killed him in his original life. As the town burns behind them, from the fires the October Boy lit as a distraction to reach the church and from his own suicidal inferno after winning: Paul, Kelly, Kim and Paul's father leave the town forever and are long gone before the fire goes out. This was an incredibly interesting story with an interesting concept. The only thing I wish had been fleshed out that wasn't was why this ritual exists. I wanted a history of how the run came to be and what this repeating cycle does for the town that keeps the town leaders killing a boy every year to be reborn as this monster the next year over and over again. That being said it was a good story and I liked it a lot. I read it from October 30th to November 2nd and gave it an enjoyable 4 star rating. 

So that is everything I read for Camp Weekend Ween. I really liked what I read for this readathon and considered it a success. 

Happy Reading!

Richelle