Reprieve

(Paperback)

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Description

On 27 April 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room made famous for its monstrosities. If the group can endure its horrors without shouting the safe word, 'reprieve', theyll win a substantial cash prize a startling feat accomplished only by one other group in the houses long history. But before they can complete the challenge, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants. Those who were present on that fateful night lend their points of view: Kendra Brown, a teenager uprooted from her childhood home after the loss of her father; Leonard Grandton, a hotel manager caught in a series of toxic entanglements; and Jaidee Charoensuk, a gay international student who came to the US in search of his former English teacher. As each characters journey unfurls, deceits and misunderstandings fuelled by obsession and prejudice are revealed forcing all to reckon with the ways in which their beliefs and actions contributed to a horrifying catastrophe. A startlingly soulful exploration of complicity and masquerade, Reprieve combines the psychological tension of classic horror with searing social criticism, and seamlessly threads together trial transcripts, evidence descriptions, and deeply layered individual narratives to present a chilling portrait of American life.

Reviews

Straddles genres in the best possible way . . . Sure to spark conversation and debate at book clubs across the land * LA Times *
Reprieve takes horror as its subject, while also using the genre as its means, delivering twists and fright and the kind of storytelling that keeps you turning pages -- Rumaan Alam, bestselling author of Leave the World Behind
An eventual American classic that is unrelenting in its beauty and incisive cultural critique -- Kiese Laymon, bestselling author of Heavy: An American Memoir
A timely, devastating story about intersecting lives drawn to a dark and frightening place . . . Reprieve is the rare novel that will make your heart pound with terror while it aches with grief -- Jung Yun, author of Shelter
Surprising and spellbinding, Mattsons latest offering is a page-turner that keeps you guessing right until the explosive end . . . A must-read! -- T. Geronimo Johnson, bestselling author of Welcome to Braggsville
Mattson crafts a nail-biting horror saga while also implicating us in our sick obsession with horror. So too does the novel evoke blistering social horror, forcing us to reckon with how racism, prejudice, and complicity are more horrifyingand more fatalthan anything that goes bump in the night. Unrelenting and unforgettable, Reprieve is an American classic in the making * Esquire *

Author Bio

James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in North Dakota. The author of one previous novel, The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves, he is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a recipient of awards from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America and Humanities North Dakota. He is currently the fiction editor of Hyphen Magazine and has taught at the Universities of Iowa, Cape Town, Maryland, George Washington, Murray State and California, Berkeley. In 2009, he reunited with his Korean birth family after 30 years of separation.