Book Review: RUN TIME by Catherine Ryan Howard

 

Title: RUN TIME

Author:  Catherine Ryan Howard

Publisher:  Blackstone Publishing

Read: April 2022

Expected publication: 16 August 2022

My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟

 

Book Description:

 

Movie-making can be murder...

The project:
Final Draft, a psychological horror. Promising Young Thing Steve Dade will direct.

The tagline:
'Based on a terrifying true story. That hasn't happened - yet.'

The location:
A cottage deep in a forest, miles from anywhere in the wintry wilds of West Cork.

The lead:
Former soap-star Adele Rafferty has stepped in to replace the original actress at the very last minute. She can't help but hope that this will be her big break.

The problem:
Something isn't quite right on the set of Final Draft.
Adele is about to discover that the real horror lies off the page..

 

My musings:

 

I love the way CRH’s mind works. Nothing is ever straightforward. I may trust that the characters are telling me the truth, but in the end they always manage to surprise me. In RUN TIME, CRH takes the theme of your typical horror movie and runs with it, drawing on her brother’s experiences with the world of film. I really enjoyed how the book managed to be both a “book within a book” as well as a movie within a book, with all three mediums intersecting to create a deliciously descriptive backdrop. The concept of life mirroring a horror movie script was an intriguing and refreshingly original concept. I also felt that the chapters of screenplay provided an interesting contrast from the main story and were very “visual” – it gave me the feeling of bingeing on a favourite Netflix series. 

As with her previous book, 56 DAYS, RUN TIME relies heavily on an atmospheric, claustrophobic setting – in this case the film set of a horror novel deep in some dark Irish woods (at night time in the rain). As it plays out over a short period of time, the story is both character driven as well as paying attention to the little details that will ultimately give you the clues to what is really happening here. Our main character Adele’s fragile state of mind and overactive imagination adds another element to the unreliable narrator theme that worked well here. Some old worn horror movie tropes were skilfully woven into the story in a way that both played them down as movie props and simultaneously added tension to the story as things started to happen to Adele that she couldn't explain.

Perhaps my only quibble is that the story got bogged down a bit towards the middle just as things started to go bump in the night - I would have loved to see those scenes exploited a bit more to ratchet up tension. That said, the final reveal took me by surprise and showed me just how cleverly plotted CRH's latest book really was. 

 

Summary:

 

Whilst RUN TIME wasn’t my all time favourite CRH book, it was an enjoyable and captivating novel I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I look forward to what the author will come up with next.

 

Thank you to Netgalley and Blackstone Publishing for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.