I received a review copy from the publishers in exchange for an honest review. It has not affected my opinions.
Genre: Thriller Age Range: YA Star Rating: 4 stars Series: standalone
Blurb:
Rules of The Midnight Game: Do not turn on the lights. Do not go to sleep. Do not leave the building.
When a group who have met on a creepy Deddit thread decide to meet in real life, they only have one plan in mind: they are going to summon the Midnight Man. And once you start the Midnight Game, you must finish it – there’s no other way out! Six strangers. One night. But how many survivors?
Blurb taken from Goodreads. Add to your shelves here. Find on Amazon UK, the Book Depository, and Bookshop.org UK (affiliate links.)
Review:
THE MIDNIGHT GAME is a spooky tale about six strangers on the internet meeting up to play a game that, legend says, will bring a demon to haunt you. But not all the players are there for innocent reasons.
I absolutely flew through this in the evening (around various family board games.) Once again, I stupidly started this late and it’s really creepy! (I have a much lighter book ready to read once this review is written so I can sleep!)
This story mixes both a very human thriller of not knowing who can be trusted and a paranormal scare of the midnight man stalking the shadows. It’s a nice mix, so you can bring your own level of scepticism or belief and still have a threat that you can believe in, a way to rationalise what’s happening so you don’t feel broken out of the story by what you might or might not believe.
This is a multi-media book, with “deddit” threads, DMs, texts, and online articles between each chapter. I love multi-media books a lot, the fun that can be had with different mediums of storytelling in print form. In this book, the multi-media slowly unpeels the mystery of what happened during a previous (fatal) game and how it ties into the game playing out in “real time.”
I loved the game descriptions – apparently they’re all real (and all “nope, never playing, why would anyone?”) and written in a very funny way. They were nice moments of levity among a very creepy book, which definitely helped at times!
Read my reviews of other books by Cynthia Murphy:
Standalones:
Sifa Elizabeth Reads 