BOOK REVIEW: Disco Deathtrap by Cameron Roubique

After four students from DeAngelo High are killed in a drunk driving accident, an English teacher and a gym teacher team up to organize an all-night lock-in at Rollerville Roller Disco on New Year's Eve 1980 to prevent losing more of their students. Sadly, they would've been safer anywhere other than Rollerville, which is rumoured to have been built over a cemetery. With a blizzard piling snow against all the emergency exits and a chain on the front door, there is nowhere to run once the slaughter begins.

I'm a huge fan of '80s slashers and I'm always looking for books that have a similar plot and style to the movies that I love. Disco Deathtrap perfectly captures that '80s slasher feeling and reads like a VHS horror flick you rented from Blockbuster. I enjoyed every minute of it and can't remember the last time I had this much fun reading. I had been in a bit of a reading slump before I started Disco Deathtrap and I'm so happy that it brought me out of it!

Other slasher novels I've read have had one-dimensional, stereotypical characters, but Cameron Roubique spends a lot of time introducing and fleshing out the large cast of characters before the action starts so I really cared about them when bad things started to happen. Another pet peeve of mine is when novels have a lot of characters and they're too similar and it's hard to tell them apart, but each character in Disco Deathtrap has enough unique characteristics to easily differentiate them from each other.

Obviously, since I'm a slasher fan I'm also a huge fan of gore and Disco Deathtrap has TONS of blood and guts. There's also a real '80s feel with lots of references to songs playing at the roller rink, fashion, etc.

If you're a fan of '80s slashers, definitely check this one out. I can't wait to read his other books, Kill River and the sequel, Kill River 2. Hopefully Cameron Roubique will be writing more "Year of Blood" books like he mentions in the Afterword of Disco Deathtrap.

Rating: 5/5