Xanadu’s Reviews > Fairly Bad Ways to Die > Status Update

Great example of the logic in this book: His bones were picked clean, so there were no dental records to identify him with. Right...yeah. Wow. The whole ending is building up in absurdity to that last line. You would think it was an absolutely BRILLIANT satire if you hadn't read everything before it.

Leave it to a book glamorizing gen Z to depict the protagonists congratulating themselves in modified 80s cliches for being heroic while running away from danger and leaving someone older to deal with it (and a friend to bleed out). No regard for personal ability or training or physical reality whatsoever.

Very Wes Craven denouement.

The most obnoxiously modern group of kids you can imagine, yet they've forgotten cell phones have cameras AND phones. The culprit reversal really doesn't count as a twist and the scene of Goonies-gang camaraderie amidst the carnage is really out of place, complete with "all hands in the middle" and a catchphrase. Hard not to root for the villain now.

Figured we'd end up here eventually, and the stuff in between wasn't handled well, but this is a pretty unexpected presentation. Might end up being pretty original and could still pull this all together.

McAuley knows how to talk to nerds, but the action scenes here could use a lot of polish.

Big reveal but pretty facile. Character decisions no longer reflect the circumstances. Very smart to do the turnaround on the rentacop, keeps things interesting. Gets nihilistic in service of shock value.

They're all taking the cannibalism thing really well.

There are some expertly crafted scenes here, but they're so erratic. One moment we're in an intimate dialogue-driven character drama, the next it's a gory monster movie, then a little identity-politics lesson, then back to the 20-somethings who behave like they're 17. And yeah, I should have seen a phrase like "misogynist hierarchy" (not an exact quote) coming with how this one started.