✦ BLURB ✦
🩸 you can't bury guilt. it rots its way out.
✶ PRE-READING ✶
A locked-room setup on a private island? A viral mansion rental, secret trauma, and rich kids with buried truths? Yes, yes, and absolutely yes. This promises classic YA horror energy - dead friends, bad decisions, and no way off the island. Very ready to see who dies first and how long the guilt stays buried.
✶ POST-READING ✶
As I thought... The vibe is absolutely And Then There Were None meets Yellowjackets, with that awful sense of inevitability creeping in early. Cindy's atmospheric pacing and sharp teeth for class and privilege made every chapter feel like it was tightening the noose. The island setting is a perfectly contained pressure cooker, and the group dynamic fractures just fast enough to feel plausible.
It surprised me by... How unrelentingly sad it is. Beneath the paranoia and slasher tension, this is a story about guilt and grief poisoning everything it touches. The final twist - which I won't mention here for spoilers, but it's amazing -lands like a gut punch. There’s no triumph here. Just devastation. And it works. The social media chats scattered through the book really help, too.
✦ RECOMMENDATIONS ✦
Book Recommendation: Good Girls Die First by Kathryn Foxfield. Like This Is Where We Die, this one brings a group of teens to an isolated setting with a shared secret - and then starts picking them off one by one. Both books lean into psychological horror as much as physical danger, with toxic friendships, moral rot, and the lingering question: who deserves to survive?
TV or Movie Recommendation: Yellowjackets. Both stories are about teenage survivors of a disaster whose lives were shattered by the choices they made. There's a strong throughline of unspoken trauma, fractured loyalties, and escalating paranoia - especially as secrets get peeled back and it becomes clear that survival came at a terrible cost. And like This Is Where We Die, Yellowjackets isn't afraid of a downer ending or letting grief curdle into violence.
✦ MUSIC PAIRING ✦
Because sometimes, the heart of a story plays out like a song.
Featured Song: “bury a friend” by Billie Eilish – twitchy, whisper-dark paranoia with layered menace.
Vibe Album: The Turning: The Turning OST – grim, moody tracks full of echoes and ghost-ridden energy.
Artist Recommendation: Banks – gritty, feminine, broken-control energy.
✧ VIBE CHECK ✧
🎨 Colour Palette: blood in water, mist over grey stone, the green of sickness
🎬 Soundtrack: The Descent meets The Lodge
🍂 Season: late fall - cold, wet, already dying
💭 Mood: paranoid, regretful, hollow
🌫️ Scent: salt-drenched linen and the sharp tang of fear
★ TAROT CARD PULLED ★
Three of Swords – Dark Grimoire Tarot
A woman folds her arms in front of a book, while ghosts whisper and hover behind her. She tries to contain it, deny it, forget it - but the dead won't let her. This is the perfect card for a story about survivors haunted by what they did, and a killer who couldn't survive the weight of what they lost. The pain here isn’t a twist. It’s the core.
This Is Where We Die publishes on 3rd July, 2025. I received a free copy and am giving an honest review.
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