I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Horror movie buff Charley Ryan isn’t expecting much when she’s enrolled at a girls’ boarding school on a remote island. That is, until someone starts killing off the senior class. From elaborate scare tactics to severed heads in fridges, these gruesome murders are straight out of Charley’s favorite films. To top it off, she’s also seeing the ghosts of her former classmates.

No one’s surprised when Charley’s taste in movies makes her the prime suspect. Determined to clear her name, she sets out to find the killer before her campus becomes more graveyard than school. She’s equipped only with her encyclopedic knowledge of horror cinema and the help of her trusty cinephile best friend, Olive—oh, and those pesky ghosts, if they can shut up long enough to lend a helping hand.

Short and Sweet Review

How to Survive a Horror Movie, follows our main character Charley who’s an avid lover of horror movies and murders taking place at the boarding school she attends on a remote island.

How to Survive a Horror Movie, is a relatively short book and an easy one to get through. Our main character is Charley and she’s newer to the school so people are still wary of her, her only friend is her roommate Olive. They both spend their free time watching horror movies and basically being outcasts. When some of her classmates begin to get murdered Charley is looked at as the main suspect because of her love of horror movies and because people don’t know much about her. Charley is now being haunted by her dead classmates and decides it’s up to her to figure out who really killed them and to clear her name. I wasn’t a fan of Charley or Olivia. I guess I can appreciate the fact that they accepted that they were outcasts but I think I was rubbed the wrong way when they were talking about their dead classmates at the memorial in a disrespectful way. Charley also decided that she wanted to solve the mystery using all of her horror movie knowledge but at the first sign of things getting hard she was ready to pack her bags and give up. The depiction of the ghosts was pretty gory, Charley was able to see them in the way they died and some of their deaths were pretty brutal, but I did like how they didn’t mince words with Charley. I thought the plot was interesting, each chapter we have a rule that you should follow in horror movies, I think this would be good for someone being introduced to horror movies.

Overall, I thought this book was okay, the plot is what really drew me in but I couldn’t connect with any of the characters which is what I found to be the biggest downfall.