The Girl in the Video - One of the Best Joe's Read This Year!
The Netflix series Black Mirror opened a lot of people’s eyes to a different type of horror that has actually been around for a while. The popularity of the series though seems to have brought this type of near-future tech horror to the forefront and I’ve been seeing a lot more of it lately.
The new novella by This is Horror head honcho, Michael David Wilson titled The Girl in the Video isn’t quite the same as the stuff you would see on Black Mirror but it’s in the same ballpark. It takes a seemingly innocuous event that has become all too familiar in today’s society and flips it completely on its head. As is usually the case with my reviews of short books like this, I’ll try not to give away too much ahead of time.
The basic premise is something anyone who uses social media has had happen to them. You get a message from someone you know asking you to click on a link to a video. If you’re like me, and most other people I know, you delete the message without giving it a second thought. But in The Girl in the Video Wilson poses the question: what could happen if you actually clicked on the video and watched it? And the results are terrifying.
What stuck me most about this novella was the ability of Wilson to make me connect with the protagonist, Freddie. Although he did something extremely stupid by clicking on that video in the first place, I was able to understand and follow most of the decisions he made from that point on. MDW has a way of making the regular day-to-day actions of Freddie and his wife seem like something I could see happening in my own life. For me, it was the realness of the lives and of the situations the characters found themselves in that made this such a quick read.
As with a lot of books this length, the key is to get enough information about the characters across to make the reader care about them and keep the plot moving forward enough to keep the reader interested. This isn’t always possible because of the limited word count. But Wilson is masterful at keeping the story moving while making us care for his characters. He ups the stakes with nearly every turn of the page and brings this all-too-possible horror to life.
This is one of the best books I’ve read so far in 2020. Wilson takes the horror right into our pockets and makes us carry it around with us every day. Solid 5/5 on this one, go pick it up.
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