Secret Santa

Author: Andrew Shaffer
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: November, 2020
Page count: 220
Genres: adult, horror
Date read: October 29, 2020
Number of times read: 1
Format: ebook
Source: Quirk Books via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

Summary

The Office meets Stephen King, dressed up in holiday tinsel, in this fun, festive, and frightening horror-comedy set during the horror publishing boom of the ’80s, by New York Times best-selling satirist Andrew Shaffer.

Out of work for months, Lussi Meyer is desperate to work anywhere in publishing. Prestigious Blackwood-Patterson isn’t the perfect fit, but a bizarre set of circumstances leads to her hire and a firm mandate: Lussi must find the next horror superstar to compete with Stephen King, Anne Rice, and Peter Straub. It’s the ’80s, after all, and horror is the hottest genre.

But as soon as she arrives, Lussi finds herself the target of her co-workers’ mean-spirited pranks. The hazing reaches its peak during the company’s annual Secret Santa gift exchange, when Lussi receives a demonic-looking object that she recognizes but doesn’t understand. Suddenly, her coworkers begin falling victim to a series of horrific accidents akin to a George Romero movie, and Lussi suspects that her gift is involved. With the help of her former author, the flamboyant Fabien Nightingale, Lussi must track down her anonymous Secret Santa and figure out the true meaning of the cursed object in her possession before it destroys the company—and her soul. via GoodReads

Review

One of the first thoughts to pop into my head as I was reading this wasn’t even my internal monologue, it was Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa and he said, “I hope you like 80s horror novels Miss Meyer, because you’re in one.” So that tells you exactly what you need to know about this novel – it’s meta as hell from start to finish. It’s somehow both like and unlike Shaffer’s more well known Obama/Biden mysteries. They’re both very aware of the fact that they are riffing on very real things, and they’re both trying to be funny about it. With this book at least those funny moments come off far too forced. Shaffer really leans into the 80s horror aesthetic though and I am here for it. This book his Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine but for adults vibes all over the place. He knows who his target audience is.

Plot wise it’s nothing special, like I said it’s very reminiscent of a Pike or a Stine novel and those always had a predictability element. This book channels a similar type of occult to Pike’s The Wicked Heart which is a book I read in high school which was so traumatic that I still feel the effects of it to this day and I hate thinking about that book. It’s obvious to the reader what is happening right off the bat, the point of the book is to watch Lussi come to the conclusions that the reader has already made. It’s interesting to see how she handles the situation once she realises what is going on. She behaves about the way you would expect an 80s horror heroine to behave. Think if Lydia Deetz grew up and moved to New York to go into publishing – actually I could totally picture Winona Ryder playing her in a film adaptation except Lussi’s in her early 20s.

If you like 80s horror movies and 80s horror novels you’ll get a kick out of this. If you miss Goosebumps or Pike novels definitely check this out.