Who better to repel a body-snatching alien invasion than a group of teenage horror nerds? Billy and Tom are best friends, but each knows that at the end of the school year they'll be moving in different directions. But why not go out with a bang and throw one last video night? They can invite some girls over, order a pizza, then maybe try and fight the alien infection that's taken hold over their suburban town. It's The Breakfast Club meets The Night of the Creeps in this slime-drenched '80s horror romp. "Hit that first chapter. It’ll hook you, and the next time you look up, you’ll have swallowed the book. It’ll be nesting inside you like a seed, like an egg, like an invasion." -Stephen Graham Jones, author of Mongrels "The momentum keeps building. The stakes keep escalating. The monsters just keep getting worse and worse, the catastrophic mayhem more juicy and hopeless. Best of all, the writing moves like a greased torpedo, compulsively readable as it rockets through your brain." -Fangoria "If you put together the gore, action, monsters, and sense of excitement that made '80s horror movies so great, you'll only have about half of what makes Video Night a must-read tome for horror fans." -Horrortalk
Publication Year: 2013
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If you're looking for the prose version of a 1980s B-Horror Movie, this is exactly that and that's all it tries to be.
He tries to strike a fine balance on the level of metatext in this book. A smidge less genre awareness and it would disappear, leaving a bland, monsters vs. teenagers movie with no particular reason to be set in the 1980s. Any more and it would have transformed into something commenting on the genre rather than emulating it (e.g. Scream or Cabin in the Woods). Personally, I think I would have enjoyed the latter better, but that's strictly a matter of taste.
This book does exactly what it wants to do; it's biggest flaw is that it lacked the ambition to try and do more.