“Only one can survive.”
Escape rooms are one of those experiences that sound like a lot of fun to do, right up until the point in which you find yourself in one. We took part in an escape room for a birthday party this year and believed that we had all the smarts needed to identify patterns, decipher clues and find the codes needed to escape. An hour or so on, and we left feeling like the biggest morons in town. Regardless, we would have taken feeling like a bit of a lemon over the experiences endured by the characters in our latest read this year, L.D. Smithson’s 2024 thriller, The Escape Room. Pitched as a ‘Squid Game meets The Traitors’, this promised to be a high-octane reality show brimming with intrigue, tension and plenty of puzzling. How did it deliver on these promises? Join us at What We Reading for our The Escape Room book review to find out!
Date Published: 2024
Author: L.D. Smithson
Genre: Thriller, Mystery
Pages: 432
Goodreads Rating: 4.05/5
Premise
Eight strangers arrive at a remote sea fort off the south coast of England. They are gathered to take part in The Fortress, a mysterious reality TV show where contestants must solve a series of complex puzzles. However, things soon begin to take a dark turn as the games grow more sinister and the consequences of failing them become far more sinister than any of the strangers had anticipated.
The show’s grizzly purpose becomes clear when the first person is evicted from the game. Rather than be packed off home, they are left to die inside a locked room. Under the ever-present watching eyes of the public and the architect of the puzzles, the contestants are forced to wrestle with how much they’re prepared to risk and how far they are willing to go to win and survive.
What Worked
From the outset, this is one of those classic thriller formulas where everything comes together for a gripping experience. Everything from the escape room-esque puzzles, the creepy abandoned fort out at sea, the locked-room fates awaiting the losers, the constant surveillance and broadcasting to the public to the factionalism, intrigue and tensions within the group inside make for a seriously page-turning recipe.
The environment Smithson is able to create works splendidly well. The fort itself is an eerie and surprisingly original choice, with all the nooks, crannies and rooms making for a setting that feels like it would make for a totally believable show like The Fortress. This is only heightened further when the contestants are taken to the rooms underground. There, The Escape Room really becomes a story with Saw-like vibes as the industrial-feeling surroundings ratchet the terror up.
The puzzles themselves in The Escape Room are also well done and feel believable for what would be a challenging experience for eight savvy minds. The environment and settings are once again utilised well, the theming at play behind them is consistent enough and, as readers and the characters learn more about the architect behind them, it becomes easier to work them out together.
Finally, whilst the character development in The Escape Room is fairly minuscule, the factionalism and intrigue among the characters as the story unfolds is interestingly done. It was one of the big selling points of the premise for us, and Smithson does a decent enough job of showing how different characters can find themselves allying up unexpectedly with others as the stakes and situation at hand change.
What Didn’t
First off, we have a slight bone to pick with the marketing behind The Escape Room. On the cover of the book alone, Smithson’s novel is described as: ‘I’m a Celebrity meets Lord of the Flies’, ‘Perfect for Fans of The Traitors’. Whilst this is a story about a reality show, this marketing feels a bit like a ham-fisted attempt at just getting as many eyeballs on board as possible.
Secondly, the biggest drawback of the book is the characters. They are all so on the money in terms of archetypes it is so draining for anyone who has ever picked up a thriller book before. Not only do we have the trope-y characters like the nerd, the jock, the old guy, the rebel, and the good guy-love interest, but they all behave exactly the way you would expect them to.
None of the characters develop or show any sort of personality outside their initial introductions. As a protagonist, Bonnie is fine enough, but once again just tows the line as the constantly morally righteous it gets equally tiresome after a while. On top of this, it felt like Smithson forgot about most of them s by the final quarter of the book; so little time is given to their fates by the time things wrap up that you’d be forgiven for forgetting they existed.
Finally, The Escape Room is one of those thrillers that concludes by throwing a barrage of shocking twists at you, very few of them which would have ever been guessable. There are a lot of sudden revelations and discoveries that have nothing to do with the narrative itself, and it feels as though Smithson wasn’t sure which of them would be the most impactful. Some of these could have worked, had they been given more of the spotlight over others.
Verdict
It’s clear from reviews online that the consensus amongst the community is that The Escape Room is a gripping, twisty and pulsating thriller that more that delivers a high-octane and atmospheric puzzle-based mystery.
And we don’t vehemently disagree with this. Rather, we probably don’t agree quite as strongly. The setting of The Escape Room and the array of puzzles inside make for a believable reality television show and a fitting environment for a dark thriller, and L.D. Smithson does everything it needs to in showing the cliques, torn loyalties and divisions that would arise if a group of individuals found themselves trapped playing a game like it.
However, the one-dimensional characters, their lack of development and the jarring number of unguessable twists toward the end of the story really prevent The Escape Room from having the lasting impact it could have had. Had Smithson been more convincing with a smaller number of these shocks and made more of an attempt to subvert the typical tropes found in the thriller so that this was a more original story, we could have had a real classic on our hands.
Our Rating: 3/5
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
