u/litrouke

The Compound is horror-adjacent. I'd call the book "social horror" if I'm being generous or "dystopian drama / capitalist satire / character study" if I'm being more accurate.

That said, I felt more dread, stress, and concern for these characters than those of the last several horror novels I've read. This book was billed as "Love Island meets Lord of the Flies" - twenty beautiful people are isolated in the middle of a desert and pushed by producers to perform challenges and win rewards while their fraying humanity is broadcast to viewers around the world. I'd say the more accurate comparison is The Long Walk, without guns, a large cast of characters winnowed by physical trials and mental collapse.

I went in expecting a trashy campy read and was pleasantly surprised by how opposite the book was to that. Rawle has precise, economical prose, an amazing sense of pacing, and an incisive, self-conscious, emotionally dissociated protagonist who I really liked spending time with.

If late-stage capitalism and consumerist anomie is more terrifying to you than ghosts and serial killers, I'd recommend this book. It's a quick read too.

And if anyone has other reality-tv-gone-wrong recs, I'd love those. I know mostly TV series, like Dead Set and Sex House, not books.