Peter Lerangis | Through the Shattered Lens

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.

Poor Kirsten!

In the 1994 novel Driver’s Dead, teenage Kirsten is not only currently living in a house that she thinks might be haunted by the ghost of the son of the previous owners but she’s also somehow gotten a reputation for being a bad driver! (Ironically enough, the son of the previous owners was also killed in a car crash …. or was he?)

When it come to having one’s driving unfairly criticized, I could relate to Kirsten. I can still remember the pain of those days when I was “learning” how to drive. Learning is in quotes because, quite frankly, I already knew how to drive. I had seen enough TV shows and gone on enough road trips with my family to know which pedal to push and how to turn the steering wheel. And yet, every driving instructor that I had to deal with insisted on being like totally critical of me. One of the first times that I drove on the road, I got yelled at by the instructor because I didn’t look both ways before making a lane change.

“I looked in the rearview mirror!” I snapped.

Apparently, that was not the right answer because she kept yelling at me until I finally said, “How am I supposed to concentrate on driving with you talking all the time!?”

That also did not go over well. That particular instructor refused to ride with me anymore. I went home in tears so my mother went up to the school and yelled at all of the instructors for being rude to me. The next time I drove, it was with the owner of the school, who was much nicer to me. The owner of the school asked me if I had a lazy eye. “Not anymore,” I replied.

Anyway, you get my point. I somehow managed to get my license despite having to deal with some pretty clueless driving instructors.

Anyway, back to Driver’s Dead. Kirsten decides to deal with her driving struggles by getting some help from Rob. Rob shows her how to drive but it turns out that his father is a big-time racist and Rob is kind of a jerk as well. When Rob tries to grope her, Kirsten tells him to get lost. (Yay!) Then Rob turns up dead. Uh-oh.

Who murdered Rob and how is it connected to the blood that keeps seeping out from underneath the closet in Kirsten’s bedroom? And what to make of Mr. Busk, the alcoholic driver’s teacher who has apparently never gotten over his experiences in Vietnam?

Driver’s Dead is a YA book from the mid-90s so it’s definitely a bit dated. Check out the reference to floppy disks and running DOS on a computer! Check out Kirsten’s crush on Jason Priestly! But I still found it to be entertaining because Kirsten was a likable character and the plot neatly mixed the supernatural with a standard YA mystery story.

Plus, who can’t relate to being a better driver than most people realize? Ghosts and murder aside, I shared Kirsten’s struggle.