Monday, September 15, 2014

Wikedpedia



It's the return of Point Horror for the Internet generation! Don't open the door. Don't answer your phone. And whatever you do, DON'T turn on your computer...

Cole and Gavin love playing practical jokes through Wikipedia. They edit key articles and watch their classmates crash and burn giving oral reports on historical figures like Genghis Khan, the first female astronaut on Jupiter. So after the star soccer player steals Cole's girlfriend, the boys take their revenge by creating a Wikipedia page for him, an entry full of outlandish information including details about his bizarre death on the soccer field.

It's all in good fun, until the soccer player is killed in a freak accident... just as Cole and Gavin predicted. The uneasy boys vow to leave Wikipedia alone but someone continues to edit articles about classmates dying in gruesome ways... and those entries start to come true as well.

To his horror, Cole soon discovers that someone has created a Wikipedia page for him, and included a date of death. He has one week to figure out who's behind the murders, or else he's set to meet a pretty grisly end.
from goodreads.com

Beth says 2.5 Stars...
So I have to comment on two things first: I absolutely loathe the cover and the summary is flat-out wrong. It doesn't actually tell what happens in the book and gets key information completely wrong. Not really the best way to go about selling your book... As far as the plot goes, the concept is cool and put a new twist on the creepy death prediction subgenre. However, the actual execution of the idea was utterly off and really not very entertaining. The deaths were definitely a bit grisly, so it has that going for horror fans. The issue is that some of them were more than a little absurdly constructed. I'm pretty sure that giggles happened because of said ridiculousness. The whole reveal of the killer was poorly done, including the final scene of violence. The characters didn't react in any manner of a normal way and there are serious questions of plausibility. I totally get suspension of disbelief in novels, but it seemed like this was (for the most part) attempting to be realistic. I had an issue with the formatting as well, with the tweets featured in some chapters coming from most to least recent like in a news feed. However, that's not particularly helpful for someone trying to read a bit of narrative through them - they should have been chronologically arranged like what happens when you click on a thread of tweets.

None of the characters were compelling in the least. One of my favorite moments in the book was when we got a peek into the mind of the crotchety old teacher. Cole annoyed me with his utter obsession with Winnie, his ex-girlfriend, and by being incredibly uninteresting. Gavin, Winnie, and the other players weren't any better. All of them played their flat, one-dimensional roles with nothing extra. There really isn't much to say, except that the murderer is pretty obvious before too long.

Overall this is a book to skip. I did manage to get a little baking inspiration and some unintended laughs out of the novel, so it's not a total loss. However, when that's the best that can be said about a horror story it's obvious there's a problem somewhere.
ebook from Netgalley

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