What a way to finish a trilogy! One Last Scare is bold and incisive storytelling that offers you a tale full of twists, turns and terrors in the night.
This is one of my favourite YA horror series – it just has everything with great characterisation, tight plotting and a wonderful balance of heart, humour and horrific moments. It has buckets of blood and genuinely feels scary but also has plenty of dark comedy and warmth. Wood toes the line expertly and that initial pitch of Scream meets Scooby Doo still holds up for me.
We open with quite a campy cold open of another case (which did feel very tongue-in-cheek Scooby-Doo-esque) and immediately you feel like you are home. The characterisation in this trilogy has always been stellar but Wood goes up another gear in this book. These are not the same people we met at the start of Let’s Split Up, for better or for worse. Their friendship is a brilliant bond, but it is also fracturing as they each try and live with the events of the previous two books. The ramifications are keenly felt here and I liked that Wood very much grapples with the concept of guilt as a central theme. They are dealing with the weight of lives lost and the personal consequences of certain actions, but ultimately what happened was not their fault. Survivor’s guilt is devastating and Wood explores this with nuance.
Because you have taken these characters into your heart, there is so much more to lose in this final chapter. The story Wood has crafted is tense and spine-chilling. I mean an abandoned theme park in the cold and darkness is eerie enough on its own, before you add in isolation and bodies starting to stack up. Every page is drenched in blood and you can really feel the evolution of the trilogy as the core four face possibly their darkest times yet.
The twists in this book are next-level. It dials up the stakes to eleven and somehow makes the atmosphere even more terrifying than the previous books. Nothing and no one is safe as this isolated scarefest starts to bring the nightmares to life for real.
A throughline in this trilogy that I have really enjoyed is an exploration of the true crime industry and how it exploits real-life suffering into neatly packaged and sensationalist tales. Since Let’s Split Up, it has been present through the media interest in these cases and in a meta way with the in-universe books about their previous stories. We go one step further here with the choice of location and the secrets buried within there. While I won’t reveal exactly what Wood is discussing, there is a really nuanced thread about the ongoing impact of trauma and the different ways people may confront it. Our core four have stared into the face of evil and lived to tell the tale but the scars it has left on each of them are still throbbing. How each of them has chosen to continue their life after the events of book two is fascinating, particularly as they come back together for this final adventure. By choosing to set this trilogy before the incredible rise of the Internet, Wood shows the groundwork for the true crime stories we are all familiar with now. There is plenty to delve into around the power of the press, the manipulation of narratives but primarily the way in which we confront real-life horrors.
One Last Scare is an excellent conclusion to a standout trilogy, packed full of thrillers and chills. I have thoroughly loved this series and am sad to bid goodbye to the Sanera Four. Wood is an exceptional talent and I cannot wait to see what he turns his hand to next.
Will you be picking up One Last Scare? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis
When Cam, Jonesy, Amber and Buffy are invited to experience a new theme park called Chillshore, the gang jump at the chance of some down-time together. They can kick back on this remote island, check out the rides, no chance of any gruesome murders or mystery-solving in sight. Right? Wrong.
Death has come to Chillshore, with creepy cabins in the woods, gruesome discoveries lurking beneath frozen water, decades-old secrets cracking open like black ice. None of their fellow guests can be trusted and no-one is safe.
As the body count rises, can the Sanera Four survive, or will this be their One Last Scare?
