Ten – Gretchen McNeil

Title: Ten by Gretchen McNeil
Publishing Info: September 18, 2012 by HarperCollins
Genres: Horror, Mystery/Thriller, Young Adult
Find it on the web: Buy from Amazon // GoodreadsDate Completed: October 13, 2012

    It was supposed to be the weekend of their lives—an exclusive house party on Henry Island. Best friends Meg and Minnie each have their reasons for being there (which involve T.J., the school’s most eligible bachelor) and look forward to three glorious days of boys, booze and fun-filled luxury.
    But what they expect is definitely not what they get, and what starts out as fun turns dark and twisted after the discovery of a DVD with a sinister message: Vengeance is mine.
    Suddenly people are dying, and with a storm raging, the teens are cut off from the outside world. No electricity, no phones, no internet, and a ferry that isn’t scheduled to return for two days. As the deaths become more violent and the teens turn on each other, can Meg find the killer before more people die? Or is the killer closer to her than she could ever imagine?

I really enjoyed reading TEN It was the perfect amount of creepy, just a bit of ghost story, and I definitely felt like I needed to read it in the daylight and not the dark. I know it’s a retelling of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None, but since I hadn’t read it, I didn’t really know what I was in for.

TEN played out pretty much like an old 90s slasher film for me — and I loved it. So Meg and her friends are on the an island. It’s the worst storm of the century. The power’s been cut. They find a creepy DVD (the Ring?? Ahhh! There was another reference to that later on too). Oh, and there’s a killer among them, picking off their friends one by one and marking it with red slashes of paint on the wall each time one of them is killed. Pretty freakin’ creepy.

Despite the fact that I’m not a horror fan (seriously — I had to stop a ghost story earlier in the week because ghosts flat out terrify me), I really enjoyed reading this. It was the perfect amount of freaking me out because I could put the book down and not feel like I was going to get attacked or anything. I contemplated putting the book in the freezer (10 points if you get the reference) but I kept on reading and was quite surprised with the ending! In true slasher film form, it was a nice twist the way everything played out. I felt like there was a twist coming, but I couldn’t figure it out until the reveal.

Meg: Meg seemed like a pretty normal character. I liked the writer-geek in her and she just seemed very low-key and (despite the almost calm while dealing with killers and dead bodies) it seems like she and I would handle situations similarly, especially with her friendship with Minnie. Minnie seems like a tough one to deal with, and in all honesty, I probably would have ditched my Homecoming date to spare my best friend too.
Minnie: Minnie really threw me for a loop. We find out that she’s on medication for anxiety/depression (sorry, I think I was mixing them up in the book), but I kept wondering the whole time how it was playing into our murder story. Was she the killer and went crazy off of her meds? Was she going to create some kind of dangerous situation? Was her mental illness more than what we believed it to be? Lots of interesting questions that came up with that aspect of the story.

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This book was so much fun! It totally reminded me of 90s slasher films. I wouldn’t say it was amazing or anything but a really fun horror/mystery, especially for Halloween-time!