⭐⭐⭐
I went into Camp Blaze expecting a grimy, over-the-top slasher and, to be fair, that’s exactly what it delivers. Unfortunately, it rarely feels like it wants to be anything beyond that. The entire novel leans so heavily into shock value that it starts to feel repetitive long before the ending arrives. Every brutal scene is written to top the last one, but after a while, the violence stops having any impact because there’s very little underneath it.
The setup itself feels incredibly familiar. Isolated camp, group of characters, escalating violence, sadistic killer. There’s nothing wrong with using classic slasher ingredients, but the book never really does much to separate itself from the dozens of other camp horror stories already out there. It hits all the expected beats without adding much personality or atmosphere to make them memorable. By the halfway point, it started to feel less like a tense horror novel and more like a conveyor belt of gruesome set pieces.
One of the biggest issues for me was the constant perspective switching. The narration jumps between characters so quickly that it becomes genuinely hard to follow at times. You settle into one character’s thoughts and perspective, only for the book to abruptly shift into someone else’s head with barely any breathing room. There were several moments where I had to stop and reread sections because I suddenly realised I was no longer following the same character. Instead of building tension, the rapid-fire viewpoint changes made the whole thing feel messy and disjointed.
That also makes it difficult to connect with anybody in the story. Most of the characters blur together because you’re never with them long enough to really get a sense of who they are beyond surface-level traits. In a slasher, strong character work can make the violence hit harder because you actually care who survives. Here, the deaths mostly just feel like the next spectacle in line.
To give the book credit, Jon Athan absolutely commits to the brutality. If you’re looking for extreme horror with graphic kills and relentless cruelty, it definitely delivers that. The pacing is also fast enough that it never becomes boring. Even when I was rolling my eyes at certain moments, I still kept reading because the novel moves at a breakneck speed. It’s the literary equivalent of a loud slasher sequel you throw on late at night: entertaining in small bursts, but not especially memorable once it’s over.
I think that’s ultimately where I landed with it. I didn’t hate it, but I also never found myself particularly invested in it either. It’s a perfectly readable extreme slasher novel that prioritises gore and shock over atmosphere, character, or substance. Readers who mainly want outrageous violence will probably get more out of it than I did, but for me it just felt too generic to leave much of an impression.
Gareth Ellis - Author 