3.5
Project 17
ByPublisher Description
High atop Hathorne Hill, near Boston, sits Danvers State Hospital. Built in 1878 and closed in 1992, this abandoned mental institution is rumored to be the birthplace of the lobotomy. Locals have long believed the place to be haunted. They tell stories about the unmarked graves in the back, of the cold spots felt throughout the underground tunnels, and of the treasures found inside: patients' personal items like journals, hair combs, and bars of soap, or even their old medical records, left behind by the state for trespassers to view.
On the eve of the hospital's demolition, six teens break in to spend the night and film a movie about their adventures. For Derik, it's an opportunity to win a filmmaking contest and save himself from a future of flipping burgers at his parents' diner. For the others, it's a chance to be on TV, or a night with no parents. But what starts as a playful dare quickly escalates into a frenzy of nightmarish action. Behind the crumbling walls, down every dark passageway, and in each deserted room, they will unravel the mysteries of those who once lived there and the spirits who still might.
On the eve of the hospital's demolition, six teens break in to spend the night and film a movie about their adventures. For Derik, it's an opportunity to win a filmmaking contest and save himself from a future of flipping burgers at his parents' diner. For the others, it's a chance to be on TV, or a night with no parents. But what starts as a playful dare quickly escalates into a frenzy of nightmarish action. Behind the crumbling walls, down every dark passageway, and in each deserted room, they will unravel the mysteries of those who once lived there and the spirits who still might.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesProject 17 Reviews
3.5
“Let's just be honest here, this is not a horror novel. This is not about teenagers wandering around a haunted asylum. Those things do happen, but they are all in service of a cliché Breakfast Club knock-off with poorly written ghosts instead of an angry Vice Principal. Instead of well crafted horror scenes with carefully built tension that leaves you with chills and goosebumps, you get nauseating little love stories about losers and popular kids holding hands and making out in janitor closets. Worst of all, it's kind of fucking boring. How do you manage to make a haunted asylum book boring? By staffing it with played out characters that feel like they drifted off the script of a Disney Channel Orignal and focusing on the cute little smiles and winks the aim at each other instead of the hauntings and spirits. There are ways to make saccharine middle school love story and paranormal horror smash together successfully, but Project 17 is definitely not an example of that. 85% of the effort clearly went into the romance and the other 15% was in cobbling together some half-assed tropes that will leave your eye lids heavy and not your heart beating fast. Poorly written characters that talk like fucking Archie comics getting butterflies from the poor, misunderstood outcast and farting their way through a story that doesn't make sense and seems to fundamentally misunderstand ghost lore, doesn't make for a good horror or a good romance. It makes for 247 pages of Samantha's fan fiction she wrote during her lunch between English 10 and US History.”About Laurie Faria Stolarz
Laurie Faria Stolarz is the author of Welcome to the Dark House, Return to the Dark House, and the Touch series, as well as Project 17; Bleed; and the highly popular Blue Is for Nightmares; White Is for Magic; Silver Is for Secrets; Red Is for Remembrance; and Black Is for Beginnings. Born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, Stolarz attended Merrimack College and received an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston. For more information, please visit www.LaurieStolarz.com.
Other books by Laurie Faria Stolarz
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