Book review - Dead Flip

 

Title: Dead Flip

Author: Sara Farizan

Genre: horror

Similar books: Fearbook Club by Richard Hamilton

                      The Dollhouse by Charis Cotter

Rating:

 

not as scary as we might like

Summary (provided by publisher): Growing up, Cori, Maz, and Sam were inseparable best friends, sharing their love for Halloween, arcade games, and one another. Now it’s 1992, Sam has been missing for five years, and Cori and Maz aren’t speaking anymore. How could they be, when Cori is sure Sam is dead and Maz thinks he may have been kidnapped by a supernatural pinball machine?
These days, all Maz wants to do is party, buy CDs at Sam Goody, and run away from his past. Meanwhile, Cori is a homecoming queen, hiding her abiding love of horror movies and her queer self under the bubblegum veneer of a high school queen bee. But when Sam returns—still twelve years old while his best friends are now seventeen—Maz and Cori are thrown back together to solve the mystery of what really happened to Sam the night he went missing. Beneath the surface of that mystery lurk secrets the friends never told one another, then and now. And Sam’s is the darkest of all . . .

My opinion: This book is being compared to "Stranger Things", largely on the basis of it's horror set up and 80s/90s setting. That comparison is, frankly, a bit overblown. While they share some elements, this book is lacking the pathos and complexity of the show. It's a pretty standard horror story, a missing kid the result of a seemingly normal object. It's reminiscent of movies like "Big" or "Flight of the Navigator" as much as it is "Stranger Things". While the interplay between characters is interesting at first, it isn't enough to drive the whole book. There are some solid creepy images but it's not especially scary. The conclusion gets a bit muddled which also damages the scare factor.