25 October: Kill River Trilogy

 

We’ve come to the movie challenge for Cinematic Void’s 31 Days of Voidoween that I’ve been looking forward to all month. Today’s topic, “Slasher Film,” is one that is near and dear to my freshly-ripped-from-my-rib-cage heart. As a kid growing up in the 1980s, I became a horror addict thanks to movies like Halloween II, Friday the 13th, Part 3, and My Bloody Valentine. Fangoria magazine was a holy text as far as I was concerned, and a trip to the Horror section of my local video store was like going to church.

Today, we’re gonna talk a brand new slasher trilogy that I think thirteen-year-old me would have absolutely loved - I know the fifty-year-old me does! This isn’t a trio of films, however. It is a series of novels by Cameron Roubique. They are set in the 1980s at a theme park the locals call...Kill River!

The first in the trilogy follows the exploits of four teens who have better things to do than hang around camp all summer. Stealing a raft one night, they make their escape, but accidentally stumble upon an uninhabited water theme park called Thrill River. The park, unfortunately, is not as empty as Cyndi, Stacy, Zack, and Brad think it is. Slowly, but surely, one by one, the teens’ numbers are whittled down until the Final Girl must go up against the masked killer by herself. As we move from book to book, we follow that Final Girl as she tries to put that summer behind her. Unfortunately, the Thrill River Killer has other plans.

These three books are a must for slasher fans. Roubique does a really fine job pacing his trilogy. In the first book, for instance, we spend a lot of time getting to know Cyndi and her friends at the summer camp before we head off into the wilds. By the time these characters begin to be picked off by the killer, we feel connected to them, and their deaths come as a shock.

The kills of the Kill River trilogy are also intense. They hit hard not only because of the viciousness of the killer, but for the fact that Cyndi and her friends are so young. Slasher fans are used to seeing 20-somethings passing themselves off as teenagers in movies. The ages of the characters in a slasher usually hover around seventeen. Cyndi in Kill River is thirteen. Those four years make a HUGE difference to the violence perpetrated on these characters! We also get to hear the thoughts of the victims as the killer preys on them, which also makes the violence in these novels even more horrific.

Cameron Roubique’s Kill River trilogy is a great addition to the slasher genre. Pick ‘em up here...if you dare!