The Boy Meets Girl Massacre by Ainslie Hogarth

I was given a copy of this novel from the publisher on net galley in exchange for an honest review

WARNING: While this does not contain true spoilers, I do use book quotes to get my points across.

Noelle takes a summer nightshift job at the infamous Boy Meets Girl Inn, even though she's well aware of the grisly murders that happened there decades ago. That's why she has a diary—to write down everything she experiences in case things go bump in the night. But the inexplicable freezing drafts, the migrating rotten-flesh smell, and the misplaced personal items don't really scare her. Noelle has bigger problems: her father's ailing health, her friend Alfred's inappropriate crush, and the sore spot on the back of her head that keeps getting worse.

When a party commemorating the anniversary of the original killings ends in a ghoulish bloodbath, Noelle's diary becomes the key piece of evidence for investigators. But the cryptic and often incoherent entries suggest there is more to the bizarre case than can be rationally explained...

This book was awful, there I said it. I HATED it. It was foul, not scary, and poorly written. The only interesting thing was the fact this was an "annotated" version. Which means the style this was written in is a found journal being reviewed to become a horror movie. So it has police footnotes and notes from the movie people. Which were the ONLY pieces of writing worth reading.

I can get what the author was trying for, a scary ghost story with a fucked up main character who feels a bit crazy and weird, with parts deemed to disturb, bother and disgust the reader into being freaked out. However, the author failed. All she managed to do was gross me out so that I didn't even want to finish it, not scare me and make the main character unsympathetic and revolting.( AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY.)

I made notes as I went and I am going to share them so that you can get a feel for why I didn't care for this book, at all.

1) There is WAY too much description in this book that needs a super good editor. Not just too much description but description that doesn't make sense.

"Amidst all the filling and spilling of patterned space, my sore brain just kind of vaporizes. And it hisses out of my ears like a really satisfying fart."

"Patterned space is the perfect temperature, moist warm insides of a just done cake; patterned space enters my body and fills it up and spills it back out again, scary at first but just for a split second, and then you let it happen, filling up and spilling out and filling up and spilling over and over again."

"Staring at the woman's floured eyes." MC uses this description so many times and I still have NO idea what it means. I didn't realize floured was a adjective.

2)Some things that the MC says are kind of real, bust mostly she whines and is annoying. Like she is kind of mean and her inner dialouge is totally what people think but would never say out loud...Then the author takes it too far and you are like, "Whoa, what the hell was that?"

3)She is SO angsty and over emotional and all over the place. The footnotes at one point state, "We're going to have to scrap all this touchy feely teenage stuff. That's what books are for." I was reading thinking, "cut this crap from the book too!"


4) At one point she decides her diary is alive and has a "birthing it" kind of ceremony. From then on she treats the damn thing like a living creature. While at times she seems normal then she does the weird living dairy thing and the creepy bits with the spot on her scalp and it's confusing... Was I supposed to decide this girl was legit crazy?

5)About 30 % into this book I had to stop and really think, "what is this book about? Where is the plot?" Cause seriously, up until then it was just a bunch of crazy writing, emo junk and over description of the weird canker sore in her brain and how she likes to dig her fingers into the sore spot on her scalp. (eeeww)

6)The author had so many comments about fat people it became less about describing the characters and more about how the author couldn't find any other way to make a character repulsive. She just kept using the words; fat, overweight, enormous and pudgy. She made every unsavory character like the MC's dad and the .... bad guy??? (to be honest never could quite figure out who the villain was) out to be a slovenly over weight person. In fact the fat people details just got worse and worse. Like this bit that honestly didn't improve the scene at all:

"He strapped her to the bed, not that she could have easily gotten up anyway being as big as she was, and over time severed each of her limbs with care, one by one, tying them off tight as sausage ends, stopping the blood off so she would remain alive."



7) This book was just plain nasty and not like torture porn or watching zombies eat brains...just nasty..Like watching a kid eat his or her boogers or watching someone lick up vomit.

8)At one point the MC is wondering whether or not she and her mom had the same vagina, like people inherit eye color. After asking around and from personalexperience I could find NO women who have ever pondered whether or not they inherited their mother's vagina. I actually wondered for a moment if a man wrote this based on how the female characters are written and portrayed...But no, it's a woman author.

9) Trigger warning; this book contains an emotionally and mentally abusive father figure. (who of course is a big fat sick lazy arse.)

SO yeah without giving anything away I cannot truly describe how revolting this book was to read, and I like horror. There were ghosts, but lame ones and it wasn't scary not one bit. It leaves things unexplained and unresolved, but not in a cool or interesting way and was just totally an uninspiring get-through-it-as-quick-as-you-can read.