Book Review: You Aren’t Supposed To Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron

‘You’re Not Supposed To Die Tonight’ by Kalynn Bayron is a YA thriller that has a strong slasher motif. It was released in 2023, and is Bayron’s sixth novel.

The story follows seventeen-year-old Charity, who has been working at an immersive theatre experience called Camp Mirror Lake, based on the events of a cult-classic slasher movie. Having worked at Camp Mirror Lake for two summers, Charity was promoted to the coveted position of Final Girl.

That means that she gets to get up and personal with the guests, who paid to get the daylights scared out of them. On top of being the Final Girl, and a minor, she is responsible for the premises’ upkeep. So, when her colleagues stop attending their shifts, right at the end of the season, she has to improvise, and bring in some help from closer to home, her girlfriend, Bezi and her best friend, Paige.

But things only start to get more grotesque and horrifying as the lines between what is an act and what isn’t blur, and the true horrors of humanity are brought to light.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times on my blog, but thrillers are very much a Marmite reading experience for me – I either love them or I abhor them. This time, I’d say I was very much under the Kalynn Bayron spell.

Bayron is an amazing writer, with a great sense of pacing and control. I loved how the story had me at the edge of my seat for the whole thing, I thought I was going insane, and although elements of the story, such as the incorporations of the supernatural into a slasher seemed a bit far-fetched in theory, the way that reality and fiction echo one another throughout the story was very clever.

I really enjoyed how Bayron used Charity, Bezi, Tasha and Paige’s dynamic to mock the slasher and horror genres while also playing into those same tropes and offering a powerful homage to the genre.

I would have loved for there to be more hijinks that could have kept us guessing for a bit longer, but that’s typical – you can’t satiate every realm of curiosity in such a short book, and for a punchy novel of just 228 pages, my God, it was fantastic. I loved this book, and it has left me wanting more Kalynn Bayron on my shelves!