Daphne Horror Book Review
It’s the last summer for Kit Lamb: The last summer before college. The last summer with her high school basketball team, and with Dana, her best friend. The last summer before her life begins.
But the night before the big game, one of the players tells a ghost story about Daphne, a girl who went to their school many years ago and died under mysterious circumstances. Some say she was murdered, others that she died by her own hand. And some say that Daphne is a murderer herself. They also say that Daphne is still out there, obsessed with revenge, and will appear to kill again anytime someone thinks about her.
After Kit hears the story, her teammates vanish, one by one, and Kit begins to suspect that the stories about Daphne are real . . . and to fear that her own mind is conjuring the killer. Now it’s a race against time as Kit searches for the truth behind the legend and learns to face her own fears—before the summer of her lifetime becomes the last summer of her life.
Horror Book Review: Daphne
Bird Box put Josh Malerman on my radar years ago when I had the privilege of reading that novel – my mind was blown. Of course, the movie adaptation starring Sandra Bullock pales in comparison simply because you are forced to watch instead of having to use your imagination putting you in the place of the characters in the book who had to utilize their God-given senses. That’s not to say that the film was bad, however, it did not have the same impact. Bird Box was followed up by a sequel, Malorie, which I purposely neglected to read simply because its predecessor ended on such a high note and left a profound impact on me that I am afraid the sequel will ruin that feeling. To me, there was no need to continue the story as I was content on how it ended, leaving the reader in wonder of what might happen after this story is told. To each their own and who knows, maybe I will give it a read.
While perusing the horror section at my local Barnes & Noble, there, sitting between a copy of Malerman’s Goblin and Malorie (the shelf was, for some reason, not alphabetized by title) was a book that adorned the face of a woman engulfed in shadow whose gaze stared back at me. Despite not being able to see her face in its entirety, it beckoned. It, she, called me. Her name was Daphne.
On the night before the big game, members of the girls’ basketball team huddled over one another at a sleepover and told each other ghost stories when the story of a town legend, Daphne, was recited. Daphne, a 7-foot tall mammoth of a girl whose face is adorned with KISS makeup is known to make her way around town in the streets of 1970s Manhasset on a bicycle too small for her stature. She was ridiculed, bullied, and, eventually, killed by members of the girl’s basketball team of the school’s past. Even though it was an accident, the vengeful spirit of Daphne will show no mercy, and the mere mention of her name out loud, in a whisper, or the mere thought of Daphne will summon her spirit to wreak havoc in the town of Manhasset.
There are heavy parallels to the 2017 horror movie flop, The Bye Bye Man, where the titular boogeyman of the film of the movie’s title appears whenever a character says or thinks of his name leaving its summoner dead in its wake.
“Don’t think it, don’t say it.”
I will even say there are a few similarities to Stephen King’s IT where Pennywise, the murderous clown, was only seen by the town’s children and invisible to the adults. This too was the case with Daphne. Here too, like in IT, the adults forgot about the town’s morbid history whether it be by choice or by a supernatural force. So while the premise is a fascinating one, where an urban legend is the driving force and comes to life to terrorize a community, it isn’t necessarily very original, see Candyman. Still, Daphne held its own… to a point.
One of the things I disliked about Daphne are the journal entries of our protagonist, Kit Lang, who makes it painstakingly clear that she suffers from anxiety. This part of the narrative is drilled into us as if we didn’t already know from the first two or three journal entries. Yes, we get it, you have anxiety. I don’t need ten pages (I could be exaggerating, I could be not) telling me this repeatedly. I felt like I was being hit over the head with this notion well more than enough and with this being a rather short novel, about 272 pages, there are only so many times you can bring this up without it being overly redundant. I dreaded these parts of the book and found myself quickly skimming through these entries because, for the most part, these passages added little, if anything at all to the story. Initially, they did because we got a better understanding of Kit and who she is but, again, stop hitting me over the head with a hammer, and let’s move on to the action, please.
Much like a slasher film, you care very little about the characters and in the same vein of the sub-genre, there is very little character development so we are not allowed the time to care about them. This works in movies because, usually, theses characters are there for one purpose, and one purpose alone – to be killed. Either way, there is usually enough given in a movie that warrants a particular death (or deaths), if not to satisfy the crowd’s yearnings. In Daphne, there seemed to be breaks in the pages that replaced chapters (a pet peeve of mine) where there is a break in the action, or setting, to introduce a new character only for that character to be killed off a few pages later. There was not a lot of substance and once you take in the legend of Daphne, which was a decent, if not unimpressive tale, there is not much to this story and it comes to a point, like a slasher film, where you are still in it just for the kill scenes and to see how this or that person will be taken out.
Overall, I was hoping for something with some “oomph” that would leave an impact on me and, more so than anything, leave me frightened. Instead, I cringed a bit at times when imagining Daphne, this seven-foot monster of a girl clad in a denim jacket with KISS makeup riding around a bike two times smaller than she is. Not scary. Sorry, but just because you make someone bigger than life and pain their face with clown makeup it doesn’t automatically mean that they are frightening. Heck, the cover art of the book is scary and ambiguous enough to allow your mind to make Daphne look like whatever you want letting your imagination run wild. I did like the campy aspect of the book, the ghost story and the legend of Daphne that comes to life – despite not being 100% original, I am a fan of this type of storytelling. There is something about sitting around a campfire and telling a good-old fashioned ghost story that gets me excited. Like Adam Cesare’s Clown in a Cornfield, Daphne, too, was a slasher that seemed to target the Young Adult demographic. There is nothing wrong with that, it just was not what I was expecting and, in the end, I was left dissatisfied and disappointed as it seemed too toned down and the book was not very strong.