Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay

It's been many months since I last posted a review, and now that I'm back after such a long hiatus, it's purely coincidental that, like the last review I posted back in December, this one is also a review of a novel about a lost film. 

Paul Tremblay is one of my favourite contemporary horror writers, and as we've already established, I'm a sucker for a lost film narrative, so my hopes were high for Horror Movie, and it did not disappoint.

The story begins with an unnamed narrator in talks to appear in a reboot of Horror Movie, an ultra-low-budget film with an amateur cast, made by a group of recent graduates, in which the narrator previously acted. The film, we learn, was never released, or even finished, but thanks to the screenplay and some of the footage being shared online by the director before her death, it has achieved cult status among horror fans as a notorious lost movie project - enough that the narrator has been able to sell signed photographs of himself at horror conventions. Now middle-aged and the only surviving member of the tiny cast production team, the narrator is set to reprise his role as the Thin Kid, an awkward, faceless teenager who is abused and manipulated by his friends with shocking consequences.

Interspersed with this are selected extracts from the script, and the narrator's own ever more disturbing account of working on the film in the 90s. The tone of the novel mirrors that of the film script: ominous, unnerving and tense as the story climbs its steady incline towards a horrific climax. Both are very much what I call 'boiling a frog' narratives, where the danger and suffering build so incrementally that one almost doesn't notice until it's too late. There are many times in the script where the Thin Kid could simply say 'Enough's enough, I'm out of here' and there are many times the narrator could say the same as he plays the Thin Kid role - but somehow, the escalation of the horror is so gradual that he becomes acclimatised to enduring it. 

Like all Tremblay's novels, Horror Movie is cleverly constructed from the first line to the last. The film script extracts are wholly convincing (and chilling) and the narrator's account - wry, self-effacing and genial at the outset and unnervingly matter-of-fact as the horror mounts - is exceptionally well-written. 

Ultimately, Horror Movie is a novel about how film becomes legend, how monsters are created, and how those monsters create more. Horror Movie isn't the kind of horror novel that's full of action - if it were indeed a horror movie, it would be more Blair Witch Project than Friday The 13th, and that's always my preference. There's an ominous tension that intensifies with every chapter, and by the end I was almost holding my breath.