Never go camping!

Seriously, if there’s any lesson to be learned from the nearly 600 posts that showed up on the site through the month of October in 2023, do not go camping.  If you take nothing else away from Horrorthon, I hope you’ll take away a strong disdain for camping in general and summer camp in specific.  Seriously, the wilderness is full of monsters and summer camps seem to breed madmen.

Just consider R.L. Stine’s 1991 novel, Lights Out.

In Lights Out, Holly is spending the summer working as a counselor at her uncle’s summer camp and it absolutely sucks!  Not only does the summer camp have a long history of weird events and tragedy but no one seems to be happy about Holly being there.  Holly doesn’t like the outdoors and she doesn’t like bugs and she certainly doesn’t like snakes, even if they’re just made out of rubber.  The other counselors, rather than trying to help Holly out, spend the entire time bullying her and then threatening her to keep her quiet.  At one point, they even throw leeches at her!  Seriously, who does that!?  Who not only collects leeches but also throws them at someone!?

Why is everyone being so mean to Holly?  Well, a lot of it because the two resident mean girls think that Holly is going to steal the attention of the male counselors.  But Holly feels that there’s something even more sinister happening at the camp.  Someone appears to be vandalizing the camp and trying to force her uncle to shut the place down.  Eventually, one of the counselors dies when someone shoves her face against the pottery wheel.

Of course, the camp doesn’t shut down.  It takes more than just one murder to shut down a summer camp.  Things come to a head when, despite being terrified of the outside, Holly takes part in leading the camp’s nature hike.  Why is Holly even working as a camp counselor?  I know it’s because her mother demanded that she do something more than just hang out around the house during the summer but, seriously — there’s a lot to do in Shadyside!  There’s so much Holly could have done!

The main message of this book is that camping sucks and I could definitely agree with that.  If the girl on the book’s cover had red hair, she could have easily been me whenever I was up at my grandfather’s farm in Arkansas and I was trying to figure out if there was a snake in the nearby high grass or if all the hissing was just my imagination.  As for the plot, it was basically Friday the 13th with a much smaller body count.  (Christopher Pike would have killed off the whole camp.  R.L. Stine is a bit nicer.)  It’s a bit of a silly book but the message comes through loud and clear.

CAMPING SUCKS!