Reviews with content warning for Cannibalism - City of Nightmares

So in this book the main character, Ness, had an older sister who turned into a giant spider and ate their dad alive. It was a super traumatic experience ya know, your older sister turning into a giant spider and eating your dad alive. Did I mention that he was alive while his daughter, who, and I cannot stress this enough, turned into a giant spider and ate him. Yep, a giant spider. She turned into one. And ate her dad. Deeply traumatic event, your sister turning into a giant spider and eating your dad that is. Did I mention that she turned into a giant spider and ate her dad? Her older sister, that is, turned into a giant spi-

Annoying, isn't that? Cause that's what I suffered through with this book. There's a lot of problems with it, but by far one of the most annoying is how often this key piece of Ness's backstory is brought up. Schaffer hammers this in until you're no longer scared of giant spiders, just annoyed. I'd personally go to Mordor and kill Shelob with my bare hands just to make Ness shut up about it.

Now, with that out of the way, let's dissect the rest of this story. Like how Ness's sister dissected their dad as a giant spider.

I am a HUGE fan of Schaeffer's first series, the Market of Monsters trilogy. It's an absolutely wild, bloody ride that's pretty dark for a YA series. City of Nightmares has the foundation to be as thrilling as the first series, even more so honestly. The premise is fascinating! When people have their worst nightmare, they turn into whatever they were dreaming about. Because of this you get people waking up as bugs or vampires or dragons or even viruses, their bodies contorting in even stranger ways if what they fear is abstract. If the person doesn't retain their human mind, then they'll go on killing sprees. Some nightmares like vamps and zombies are even contagious.

It's a really compelling and terrifying concept that demands digging deep into characters and understanding both what they fear most and what that fear would manifest as physically, while also leading to some incredibly disturbing body horror. And I'll give the book credit, it's pretty frightening and disturbing. It could be more creative with some aspects of it, like why would their only be twelve types of vampires? But it's overall pretty solid.

It would be even more terrifying if it were better written. You know those Tumblr posts that are like "you go and do your Evil Tasks™ at the Evil Store™ and buy some Evil Butter™"? This book reads like one of those, but if they were unfunny and went on for almost four hundred pages. It's quite comical how blatant it is and excessively it uses telling instead of showing. This is especially annoying when it's giving insight into what Ness thinks, as it just spells it out for you!

This gets especially annoying as the book becomes a vehicle for moral and philosophical ranting. It confuses me that this is marketed as being "morally gray" as Ness is so clearly someone you're meant to root for with all her ranting about how everyone has agency to choose good and why vampire movies are perpetuating abusive relationships. This is both confusing and ironic considering Schaeffer's previous series actually did allow characters to be morally gray and did so without preaching morality.

By the way, what was with those vampire movie rants? Because the movies are clearly a stand in for darker and/or paranormal romance movies and novels such as Twilight. You see in this book there is an Evil Vampire Director™ who makes Evil Vampire Romance Movies™ that are Evil Vampire Propaganda™ that enforce the idea that Evil Vampires™ are sexy and that consent ain't important. This lore is unimportant to the plot and simply there for the characters to talk about how bad these movies are. Now I do think there is a conversation to be had about how the media being criticized here have some very valid critiques and how they can normalize abuse and rape culture, so I don't disagree with Schaeffer's thesis, I disagree with her arguments.

I question if most of this media is actually made by people who are genuinely bad and trying to convince people their behavior isn't bad, it seems to me we more so live in a patriarchal culture and so creators often perpetuate that. There's also a line about the men who watch those movies and how that makes them think it's okay to be abusive, but I assure you men are very much not the target audience of the media being criticized and that male romantic leads are not, in fact, aspirational for most men. I actually burst out laughing at that line. But rest assured, there is plenty of male centered media that tells them it's okay to hurt women.

And the plot is meandering and weirdly a little too close to the Market of Monsters series. Girl works for someone shady, girl meets a bad boy who's literally a monster that has prey to on people to survive, things go haywire and girl and bad boy work together to survive, girl and bad boy return to society and find out that the shady person was in fact bad while also becoming close friends (but no romance, something I like about both of Schaeffer's works is how she makes the central relationships friendships between a guy and girl, Ness is also implied to be aroace). The big difference is that one of these books did that in an interesting way while the other is City of Nightmares.

Overall, City of Nightmares is my first major let down of my 2023 releases. Despite it's terrifying concept, it fumbles in execution thanks to shitty writing, one note characters, and a plot that is neither gripping nor entirely it's own. Oh, also Ness's sister turns into a giant spider and eats their dad alive, btw. In case you missed that.

TWs: LOTS of body horror, giant bugs and spiders, death and murder, drug usage, depiction of anxiety from the main POV, blood, trauma, grief, a cult, gun violence, discussions of rape culture

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