Ten

by Gretchen McNeil

[Stephanie]

More like 3.5 stars

I'm always looking for a good horror book. Anything promising to be scary, I automatically want to read. Ten was the same case. When I was in high school, for the school play one year they did Ten Little Indians, which pretty much has the same premise as Ten. I loved the play, so I was excited to read about teenagers getting picked off by a mysterious killer.

About 50 pages in I thought I knew who the killer was. I was convinced I had it right. There were so many clues that made me think it was a certain person. I should have known from the amount of clues that I was wrong. And I'm so happy I was wrong, because I think I would have been a little upset if it was that predictable.

Ten is a very typical horror novel. I went into Ten expecting a retelling of a common horror story, and I got just that. I was sucked into reading this book, and couldn't put it down until I finished and learned who the killer was.

There were a few things that bothered me, which was Minnie, Meg's best friend, who's very needy and only thinks about herself. She bugged me in the beginning but once people started dying off, I was able to deal with her. Another thing was that it took a while for things to get going, as in, for people to start dying. I remember getting to page 60 and thinking "okay, when do people start dying?". I also didn't find Ten to be that scary. I mean, people are dying, but I went into the book expecting that, so there weren't that many scary scenes.

I really enjoyed the story line of how all these teenagers, who came from 3 different schools, were connected in a way for one person to want to kill them all. Other than the mystery of who the killer was, I really enjoyed this little mystery along side it. It was actually kind of sad in a way.

So, overall I enjoyed this book and it was exactly what I needed at the moment. I was in the middle of 3 other books when I decided to pick up Ten, and I finished it in 3 days, when I've been trying to finish the other books for about a month now.