X-Isle!?
Is this a book about an island that is populated by the twenty or so people who actually refer to twitter by it’s “new” name of X?
No, actually, it’s not. X-Isle was published in 2002, in the days before social media and ever-present phones. X-Isle is a slasher story, one in which a group of good-looking teens end up hanging out at the exclusive Spinnaker Lodge, a luxury resort on an isolated island. It’s like that island that Kim Kardashian took all of her friends and employees to during the COVID epidemic? Remember that? Everyone else was locked inside or wandering around triple-masked while Kim went to an island and then scolded everyone else for not taking proper precautions.
(Sorry to get off topic there but seriously, the COVID era was messed up in ways that people are still struggling to full comprehend.)
Reading X-Isle, I found myself wandering if you really could write an effective, non-ironic, old school slasher story nowadays. The whole key to the slasher genre is that people have to be isolated and there has to be no way of reaching out for help. Every slasher movie now has to come up with some extended to reason to explain why no one can call the police. Whenever a horror movie starts with someone saying, “Give me your phone, you’ll get it back after the weekend,” I roll my eyes a little just because it’s become such a cliche. At this point, I imagine even Camp Crystal Lake has free wi-fi. It’s easy to imagine a camp counselor tweeting out, “Help! There’s a murderer at Crystal Lake!” and someone replying, “Whatever, Jussie.”
X-Isle gets off to a good start with a collection inner-office dossiers that introduce us to the main characters. What the memo reveals is that the main requirement to work at the resort is a handsome face or a good body. Once the story kicks in, we meet our group of potential victims and, unfortunately, none of them really live up to all the hype in the introduction. We spend a good deal of time with Carter, a womanizer who, at one point, feels the need to tell us that he’s not psychotic despite the fact that his behavior is often manipulative and narcissistic. When you actually have to tell people that you’re not a psycho, you probably are. Of course, in this book, Carter is one of the heroes.
Someone is killing guests and employees. It’s a YA book so we don’t actually see the kills but the aftermath is described in properly grisly fashion. The reveal of who the killer was doesn’t make much sense but, given that the book ends with a cliffhanger, that was perhaps deliberate.
Anyway, I’ve always kind of enjoyed the slasher genre, even with all of its cliches and its issues towards anyone who shows the slightest spark of independence. X-Isle was a fast and entertaining read. None of the characters were particularly likable which made it a lot less stressful to read about them being put in danger. In the end, the main lesson is to stay away from mysterious islands. That’s probably good advice.
Through the Shattered Lens