Reprieve is a relatively entertaining thriller set in the world of close contact haunted house entertainment.

The premise is strong and the story is well-structured. We know what happens from the beginning, but the interest is in how we get there and in that respect the book kept me reading.

I wasn't overly keen on any of the characters and there is a thematic exploration of race which doesn't really go into any depth at all.

'Reprieve' takes the thriller and horror genres, and runs alongside it several discussions on race, privilege and power.

The key idea in 'Reprieve' is that there is a haunted house escape room which is 'full contact', as in the actors can touch the contestants. A lot of money is at stake for winners, and the notoriety of only one team ever having completed it fuels this further.

In the background, a stable of characters with closer and closer links to each other is revealed- we have exes, jealous rivals, former roommates who now don't speak, and many more. These relationships break down further and further, and the story is peppered with court transcripts to let us know that everything truly did break down.

Although some of these were a bit tenuous and coincidental, it was still enjoyable, and managed to raise some intelligent points about race and power throughout in quite inventive ways.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

When Bryan, Jaidee, Victor and Jane team up to compete at a full-contact escape room, it seems simple. Hold your nerve through six terrifying challenges; collect all the red envelopes; win a huge cash prize.
But the real horror is unfolding outside of the game, in a series of deceits and misunderstandings fuelled by obsession and prejudice. And by the end of the night, one of the contestants will be dead.
Lots of twists and turns that keep you geussing.

Escape rooms have been all the rage and I was always very interested in reading a book about them

While Reprieve is interesting, for me it did fall short in the end. I was not as engaged as I had hoped to be and overal felt very let down.

I really wanted to like this book, I love escape rooms misteries and the premise was amazing, but maybe I was not in the right frame of mind when I read it, because I was expecting something else. I really didn't understand the mastermind motives (besides being an horrible human being) and at the end I only wanted to be finished with the book.
But the premise was good and I liked how it was written,I'm hoping the next book of the author hits more the mark for me.

I am a fan of escape rooms and always get excited over the prospect of a horror or crime thriller book using them as their setting. Reprieve, telling the story of a full-contact horror escape room gone wrong seemed like my exact cup of tea and I was so excited to have it on my TBR.

Those who have read my blog know that my downfall with a book is to get my hopes up and Reprieve was no exception I’m afraid to say. First let’s examine the setting - the thing that I love most about escape rooms are the puzzles, the riddles, the keys, the mini-games and the hidden secret rooms. The escape room in Reprieve is actually pretty boring. Each ‘cell’ is just a themed room with some actors in it and the goal for every room is to find a few envelopes. That’s it. There’s a lot of fake blood and the actors are dressed in full horror costumes and can beat the contestants with sticks but on the whole it seems to be a pretty boring game. As such the chapters based in the room (of which, frustratingly are surprisingly few) just don’t seem very engaging. They are also really badly written, to the point where I was actually struggling to picture what some of the basic rooms looked like.

Then we move onto my next issue - I was expecting the book to be based in the escape room itself, or at least to have the majority of chapters about the experience which is apparently so hard and so scary that only one team has ever made it all the way through. However, this book contains a few chapters on the escape room, a few chapters with court transcripts about the events that occurred there and then a lot of character exposition and flashbacks. We get in depth chapters from three characters; Kendra a black student who works at the house, Leonard a disturbed man who is deeply troubled and gay international student Jaidee. Kendra is the only likeable character in the whole story, but she is presented in such a generic way that I didn’t really feel much towards her. Jaidee is immensely dislikeable – shallow, racist and easily obsessed. I really didn’t enjoy reading the chapters in his perspective at all. Leonard is sexist and also easily obsessed – trying desperately to get his Thai ‘girlfriend’ to come to the US to live with him. Jane and Victor who are also in the escape room team are not really explored at all and Bryan, who should have been a central character based on the plot arch is also not really presented in a well-rounded or interesting way. There’s one character we meet who actually we would have benefitted from reading chapters in their perspective but we are denied this and it really muddies the ending and left me confused as to their motives. I think perhaps if we were given a chapter at the end from their perspective rather than the epilogue that was presented it would have made a lot more sense but instead many questions are left unanswered.

Overall Reprieve is a bit of a mess - there isn’t enough escape room content and the focus is more of dislikeable characters and a climax which made little sense in the context of the plot. Thank you to NetGalley & Bloomsbury Publishing for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

First of all want to say a huge thank you to Netgalley/publisher/author for an advanced copy of this incredible read!!

I haven’t read anything like this before and I honestly thought it was fantastic,

The whole concept behind the book was really well thought out and the author made it such an intriguing read.

The story follows contestants as they play their way through the haunted escape room and try and figure out a murder, all while competing for a hell of a lot of money.

Told from multiple perspectives the book explains each persons reason for joining the contest in the first place.

This book was incredibly satisfying to read!

Enough to put you off an escape room for good!
Working their way through consecutive horrendous experiences to win the coveted prize an unlikely band of people face fear, horror and a death in Quigley house.
The book jumps around chronologically but in a way that is easy to follow and the reveal of the why and the how is drip fed to you to keep you guessing.
A great read!

The Quigley House is famous for being a full contact escape room. The contestants have to navigate their way through a number of rooms where actors dressed in grotesque costumes and prostheses can strike, push and spray bodily fluids at them while they attempt to collect enough envelopes to move to the next level.

Reprieve tells the story of how a group of four individuals come together to form a team which will take on the Quigley House. It alternates between the stories of Jaidee, Kendra and Leonard until the stories ultimately come together at The Quigley House ending in a vicious assault where one of the contestants is murdered.

I liked the idea of a novel being set in an escape room game, but unfortunately I did not enjoy the book. I feel there are a number of questions left unanswered , with elements of the plot being left unfinished. I was surprised when the book ended as these items were left hanging in a way that made me feel that I had not actually read the end of the book.

I can only give this book 2 stars

This was a very clever book mixing horror and social commentary, but i found it very difficult to get into the story or feel any great interest in the characters,
Thank you to netgalley and Bloomsbury for an advance copy of this book

Kim afraid this one wasn’t really for me.

The blurb set a different expectation for me than the reality of the story. I expected more in the locked room experience yet at 20% of the way through the story we were no where even arriving at the experience.

I’m sure the childhoods and back stories of those involved in the locked room experience were important but I’m afraid I lost interest and this was a DNF for me.

I love a good Halloween attraction and have long been fascinated by the infamous McKamey Manor- a 'haunt' where tourists undergo military-style torture, much to the disgust of the local media. This book is inspired by generations of dimwitted thrill-seekers who ignore repeated warnings NOT to open the haunted box, enter the haunted house, taunt the haunted doll, or read from the haunted book. It chillingly demonstrates how easy it is to radicalise disenfranchised, lonely white American men- to turn them against immigrants, against women, against anyone not white, conservative and heterosexual. I expected to read a straightforward horror story- one with a supernatural threat or an unsophisticated madman. The real villain is more frightening than that, not least because he has money and a team of lawyers behind him. The author uses flashbacks as well as interview 'footage', emails and court transcripts to show the reader how (if not exactly why) events occurred. Have a care for the minimum wage workers wielding the chainsaws in your next visit to a scarezone.

We’ll written. This book has put me off escape rooms for life. Loved it and couldn’t put it down. Highly recommended if you like a scarey thriller

Set in 1997, Reprieve concerns a group of people connected to Quigley House, a full-contact "haunted house" experience where groups have to make it the whole way through to win a substantial cash prize. (It's only ever been won once.) People can opt out - and most do, because it's a nasty business - at any point by shouting "Reprieve". The Quigley House experience sounds frankly horrible, traumatic and dehumanising - "full contact" means you can be not only terrorised but physically attacked - and nothing would induce me to take part, not even the remote chance of winning some money.

Quigley House, owned and run by John Forrester, arouses strong feelings in the local Nebraska community- many finding it abhorrent, others keen to compete or work there.

The narrative opens with the aftermath of the murder of one of the members of a group of contestants (Victor, Jane, Bryan and Jaidee), and moves back in time to follow both their experience in the house leading up to that moment, and the lives of three people who will be, in one way or another, involved. These are Kendra, a teenager unwillingly uprooted to Nebraska; Jaidee, a Thai student obsessed with his former school teacher; and Leonard, a hotel manager who gets drawn into John Forrester's orbit.

There are various themes going on here and I'm not sure I fully understood all of it and the motivations of one character - John - in particular. I'd be interested to know others' take on it.

Race is clearly a major theme, expressed in various different ways through the experiences of different characters, and the 1991 Rodney King situation gets several mentions. (It's frighteningly plain to see how things have certainly not improved in thirty years.) Questions of identity, misogyny and manipulation are all present.

Kendra was a likeable character as was her cousin Bryan, and it was possible to sympathise with, if not like, various others.

While there's certainly a dash of horror with the events in the house (again, you couldn't pay me enough to put myself through it), this is in fact a relatively minor part of the story as a whole, with the bulk of the plot following various characters in the lead up. It took a while to warm up for me, but once it did I thoroughly enjoyed it.

James Han Mattson writes an excellent literary horror novel about an escape room that ends with a real murder. At the end of the escape room is a cash prize if the whole team makes it without yelling the safe word "reprieve." The story is told through courtroom transcripts and flashbacks to the game in 1997. The suspenseful plot is filled with plenty of twists and strong characterisation throughout. The setting is entirely atmospheric. Highly recommended!

I expected the majority of this book to take place in the house but it really added to the story that the reader has some insight of the characters and their lives prior to the house. It's such a clever idea, setting a book inside a haunted house/escape room, horror readers will enjoy this but the concept and the characters will keep you hooked. The writing is really great and the flow of the narrative worked really well, there was no confusion jumping between timelines and characters. Not to give too much away it's not just about characters trying to escape this seemingly terrifying haunted house, it focuses on race and identity (though it's not 'heavy' in the way it's explored. I look forward to reading more from this author!

This is without a shadow of a doubt one attraction I would not want to visit. You would need to be completely bonkers and fearless to want to take part in this escape room like game. The cells were horrifying on their own without the added devilish creatures that beat you up, electrocute you, punch, kick, scratch you and any other torture that you can think off. This book has it all and it truly is hair raising, terrifying and full of terror in more ways than one. The characters are believable and I felt so sorry for Jaidee, he's an immigrant and all he wanted to do was fit in and find his place in society, so he tried to change his self so he looked like the "Normal" kids at his college, he tried so hard to make friends but he just got laughed at. But he had more guts than any other character in the book. This is a horror story with twists and the overall plot is amazing. So watch out Stephen King there's a new horror writer in town.

Reprieve ended up being a very good book, the problem was with all the characters at the beginning getting such a long introduction. I felt I didn’t want to move on to each new person as the story wasn’t moving along, I was just reading about person after person. It turns out that after sticking with it I did like the long introductions to each persons life and the setting events, it gave something extra to the story when it linked all the characters together so that I cared how things turned out for them. It was a clever, unsettling story which I would recommend.

Four contestants, six cells, countless litres of fake blood… And one real murder.
That is the basic set up of Reprieve, James Han Mattson’s sophomore novel, and first foray into the literary horror genre.
The Quigley House is an escape room like you’ve never experienced before. A full-haunt comprised of 6 consecutive cells, where a team of 4 contestants must find envelopes amid scares both inanimate and alive, in order to continue to the next cell. In cell 6, a large prize sum will away the team, given that they all reach the end without yelling out the safe word “reprieve”.
In 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, before a man barges in with a knife and brutally murders one of them. Told through a combination of flashbacks and courtroom transcripts, we unravel the truth of what transpired in the house that faithful day, and whether or not this game was rigged from the start.

Reprieve is a difficult book to review. It has received early praise calling it a new American classic, and although it hits home on many levels, it also drops the ball too often on others. Overall I wanted to love it more than I did.
Let’s start off with the good:
Based off the description alone, you may be fooled into thinking this is a simple slasher story, but by cleverly bending and combining elements from different genres Reprieve elevates itself far above that. Woven throughout the blood and gore is a lot of powerful social commentary on racism, greed, prejudice and our societal fascination and fetishization of fear. Additionally, elements of misdirection and gaslighting amp up the tension to a nail-biting level in about the final 100 pages. Which characters are actors? Who is in on the scheme? Who is really playing games with whom? Had the whole novel been at the level of these final 100 pages, it’d been a 5-star candidate. Unfortunately it’s not.
The first 300-or-so pages were quite frankly a bit boring to me. We get descriptions of the event within the first 4 cells of the haunt (loads of actors splashing fake blood on the contestants), alternated with background of the characters and a few court-transcripts. It becomes repetitive soon and lost its appeal to me. If the goal was character-building, I don’t think the book succeeded. Too many indistinct characters were introduced in a short amount of time, having me confused as to who was who. In the end, most of them felt very much like “token minority” characters, without much depth. (view spoiler) Maybe this was part of the commentary, but I’m just not here for it at all.
In addition to being flat, the characters dialogue is written very juvenile, which creates a bit of a tonal mismatch with the themes of the book. While the story is definitely meant for an adult audience, the characters and dialogue (and the level of scares in the first 4 cells) are so immature that it feels more suited to a YA-audience.

Overall a decent thriller, laced with social commentary, that unfortunately didn’t quite live up to its full potential.

Reprieve will be available in print and in e-book format from the 5th of October 2021. Many thanks to the publisher William Morrow & Bloomsbury for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I was beside myself with giddiness when the NetGalley Approval email came through from the publisher. I had become a little obsessed with this book after seeing word of it on Twitter.
This was a truly original premise, and escape room game with a murder to try and decipher.
The execution was a little challenging for me. Each contestant has a transcript of a courtroom where the reader sees a glimpse of the escape room, and then the reader sees how the contestant came to be in there in the first place.
It was difficult to keep track of the escape room events, and who was who. I think a cast list would have really helped cement the characters in my head, as I do tend to struggle with a lot of characters.
It was a fascinating look into society, and the judgements we have of others, but it wasn't the show-stopper I was expecting.