- Publisher : Simon Pulse
- Publication date : September 29, 2026 (pre-order available)
- Language : English
- Print length : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1665983043
- ISBN-13 : 978-1665983044
- Author : Ryan Douglass
Night of Madness by Ryan Douglass is a horror novel about a young woman who is a horror buff entering a horror reality show where she and four others must ‘survive’ a night in a haunted asylum based on a movie by one of her Dad’s favorite horror directors. Mara Jacobs’ father abandoned the family years ago. They are struggling to get by, living with her grandparents. She works a dead end job in a haunted house, but when she learns of a chance to win $100,000 in the reality show, she decides to try to be one of the contestants.
The book spends sometime working through the difficulties of someone with no money trying to create enough of an online presence to be considered for the contest. Marla does some cheating and stealing to explain how she is able to ‘win’ a spot. Once in the asylum, the book reads like a movie. The author does a good job of creating a visual picture of the asylum and some of the disturbing images and experiences of the group of ‘contestants’. The problem with this is that a disturbing image on the screen is more disturbing than an short description of the same thing. I found that I never felt the fear that the people were supposed to be experiencing. Perhaps this book would hit home more with someone in its YA target audience who is more in tune with the social influencer aspects of the plot.
I don’t regret reading this book. It is well written and I think the story would make a good scary movie. I think many of his descriptions of shrinking hallways and other images could work as true images, but none of them really resonated with me from the descriptions in the book. It’s hard to feel a jump scare on print. The supposed madness is described but not really felt by the reader, or at least not by this reader.
