Reprieve
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
An autumn 2021 pick for New York Times * Observer * Esquire * O Quarterly * Chicago Tribune * Shondaland
'[A] gripping piece of storytelling' GUARDIAN
'Brilliantly conceived and unsettling' SUNDAY TIMES
'Clever, insightful and unnerving' OBSERVER
Most people didn't make it to Cell Six, he said. Most called out the safe word – reprieve – after the first Cell. It was that intense.
When Bryan, Jaidee, Victor and Jane team up to compete at a full-contact escape room, it seems simple. Hold your nerve through six terrifying challenges; collect all the red envelopes; win a huge cash prize.
But the real horror is unfolding outside of the game, in a series of deceits and misunderstandings fuelled by obsession and prejudice. And by the end of the night, one of the contestants will be dead.
A startlingly soulful exploration of complicity and masquerade, Reprieve combines the psychological tension of classic horror with searing social criticism, and seamlessly threads together trial transcripts, evidence descriptions, and deeply layered individual narratives to present a chilling portrait of American life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mattson (The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves) returns with the smart and harrowing story of a killing at a haunted house. In 1997, Victor Dunlap, a bank manager who used to teach English in Thailand, agrees to participate in a full-contact escape room–style challenge at Quigley House in Lincoln, Nebr. His four-person team includes his fiancée, Jane Roth, who is obsessed with Halloween but finds being handcuffed, shocked, and muzzled with electrical tape by the haunted house's staff to be a bit too much; and Jaidee Charoensuk, a university student whom Victor had taught in Kanchanaburi, and who sought Victor out in the U.S. because he had a crush on him. The house supplies a fourth teammate, Bryan Douglas, a Black university student whose throat is slit in the house by Leonard Grandton in front of the others, who initially think it's part of the act. Leonard had developed a friendship with the man who owns Quigley, before becoming needy and erratic. The tense, well-paced story—meted out in snippets of courtroom transcriptions during Leonard's trial and chapters from various characters' points of view, including Bryan's cousin Kendra, who recently moved to Lincoln from Washington, D.C., and whose friend back east was concerned about her "managing all that white"—gradually reveals thematic connections as everyone grapples with understanding why Bryan was killed. It adds up to a canny use of horror as metaphor for themes of guilt, race, and sexuality. Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that one of the characters works in Lincoln, Nebr., and misattributed a line of dialogue. This review has also been updated for clarity.
