There’s Someone Inside Your House  [Buy Hardcover or ebook]
Stephanie Perkins
Genre: Slasher horror, Young Adult

First off, there is a trans dude who is never misgendered and survives the book. There. That’s the only real spoiler I’ll give because that’s the most vitally important one. Now then, the rest of the book.

I really enjoyed this book. Like, I’m gonna recommend it to everyone looking for a new Halloween read. The main plot is simple: there is a serial killer going around and slaughtering high school students. But the characters were fantastic and complex. Everybody read differently, there was no mistaking one character for another, and even the murdered characters got their moments of being people, which made their killings all more tragic.

Big warning: If you don’t like depictions of gore, this is super not for you. Every kill is brutal and specific.

I really liked the descriptions of the small Nebraska town they lived in, how everyone knew everyone else, which makes some of the interconnectedness heartbreaking. But, let’s focus on the main reason I love this book: Makani.

Makani is our protagonist and she is fantastic. She’s biracial: Black and Native Hawai’ian. She’s got some dark secret that she’s hiding, but nobody in Nebraska knows about it. What makes her such an interesting character, though, isn’t her dark secret. It’s that she’s written as fully human. She’s a good granddaughter, and sometimes she’s not. She fucks up sometimes, but fixes her mistakes honestly. She’s got shitty parents, but an amazing grandmother (Grandmother Young is by far one of my top favorite characters in the book). She’s a good person, and she makes the book so easy to read because of it.

I can’t get too in detail because, really, this is a book that’s best going into knowing nothing, or almost nothing, about. I will say the balance of somber and humor was perfect, even getting me to actually laugh out loud at some places. I super recommend it and I hope somebody reads it because otherwise I’m just gonna be over here flailing by myself.