Book Review: NEVER HAVE I EVER

Title: Never Have I Ever

Author: Harker Jones

Publisher: Self-published

Pages: 338

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ 

 

A young student, Jess, disappears after a Halloween party at an abandoned farmhouse. A year later, she still hasn’t been found. In the run-up to the anniversary of her disappearance, the following Halloween, the nerves of the townsfolk, especially those of her classmates, are already strained.

When eight students, Chase, Kim, Beth, Johnny, Biff, Andy, Scott and Christa, receive an identical text from an unknown number, asking them to play the game, Never Have I Ever, or be prepared to face the consequences, at first they fear that Jess may have returned to wreak vengeance, though no one knows what grudge she might bear. Initially, the eight students take the threat lightly until one of them is killed by someone in a scarecrow costume. Or maybe it isn’t a costume?

For at the end of the town, on the edge of the forest, lives Susan Boyle, an old and nearly destitute hag who is rumoured to dabble in magic and who is accused of having murdered her own kids. Is it Susan killing the children of the town for the rhyme they all sing about her?

First one, then another of the eight students who received the text begin to get killed. As the numbers drop from 8 to 7, and then 6, then 5, nerves are frayed, and it seems that every one of them has secrets they are hiding.

The remaining students huddle together, hoping to find answers and stay alive. Will they figure out who is out to get them before the killer comes for them again?

 

The book, written in the omniscient past tense PoV, took a long time to get into the heart of the story. For far too long, the narrative remained caught up in the drama of the high school students’ lives.

Until the 19% mark, we were still getting to know the characters. Nothing had even happened yet. Even the Prologue, which had held out some promise, seemed like a waste of time.

Around the 24 percent mark, the author was still dishing out more inane high school drama—who is crushing on who, who is in a relationship, etc. The characters took too long to figure out that they had all received the same text. Things started becoming interesting only at the 25 percent mark.

Once the killings started, the author was on a surer footing, holding the pace fast and steady, and keeping us readers at the edge of our seats. I continued to read. The author’s confidence was evident in the quality of the writing. The dialogues improved, not hitting a false note. The descriptions, particularly those relating to the rural setting, got better.

 

What marred the reading experience for me was the large number of errors. The book needed better editing.

A boy was described as, “He was so shining.” In another instance, we see this line, “Why tempt fate of suspension?’ One character, we are told, “busted into laughter.” Another character feels an “alleviation of the heart.”

In Chapter 1, we meet Barrett ‘Biff’ Branigan. Then in Chapter 7, we meet Biff’s mother, Elizabeth Barrett, even though in Chapter 6, she had been referred to as Elizabeth Branigan. The author uses the word sphincter when perhaps the word, spectre, was more suitable.

At one point, the surviving students find a tiara in a grave, and the narrator tells us the name of the student that it belonged to. A few short paragraphs later, Johnny identifies the student who owned the tiara. Johnny’s statement is meant to be revelatory but isn’t as the narrator has already made the revelation.

The students also find another student’s cuff in the same place. The thought that the owner of the tiara and the owner of the cuff may be colluding together is raised, when one student wonders how the two objects could be found together. Once again, some chapters later, Kim comes up with the theory that the owners of the two objects might have been working together and Biff cries out, “Whoa, I never considered two.”

Two different characters, Kim and Christa, think of the school principal as creepy and weird respectively. But both think, individually, that he is not a ‘pedo’.

The fact that the school building was built in an H formation was repeated twice.

A good editor would have weeded out these issues.

 

Although I was drawn into the events of the plot, I didn’t actually relate to the characters, possibly because of the surfeit of information about each one of them. Too much is told to us about them. Despite all the information, they were all no different from high school students in any other book. The only character I would have liked to know more about was Susan.

There’s a subplot that seems to be making a big deal about Biff’s sexuality, when it is obvious from the beginning.

Other than Andy’s parents who show up at the fag end of a chapter, and Biff’s mother who makes an appearance, none of the other parents have any role to play.

I thought it was clever of the author to invoke the scarecrow, the scary creature that scares birds and people alike, while bringing in a reference to Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz.

I also appreciated the author’s attempt to bolster an unlikely hero.

 

Even though I don’t really enjoy the slasher-fest sub-genre of horror, this book held my interest. I hope the author intends to build on the momentum raised by this one. The only way I could settle for that ending was if there was a Book II coming up. 

 

 (I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)