Prom Dates from Hell by Rosemary Clement-Moore

As an interactive horror experience, with beasts from Hell, mayhem, gore, and dismemberment, it was an impressive event.

Preamble that's only purpose is to establish tone. No story, just promises of good times to come. This could have been pasted onto the back cover.

Next line:

As a high school prom, however, the evening was marginally less successful.

So with the second sentence we are mercifully provided a little information with which to navigate: setting (high school) and character (teenager). In point of fact, these two sentences are really only exploring the already implied implications of the title. They aren't revealing anything new, only drawing out the perceived awesomeness of the title, and therefore stall in a stew of redundancy.

One might be able to disentangle a little juxtaposition from these two lines with the concepts of hell and high school, therefore making this opening amusing or even downright laugh-out-loud funny, but I don't see much difference between hell and high school and only shudder. Indeed, I fear a new biker (or rollerskating teeny bopper) gang in the making: Hell's Prom Dates.

Then like a lot of preambling beginnings, the cliche within the cliche, we have the line:

I should start at the beginning, but I'm not entirely certain when that is, so...

This type of opening occurs a lot more than it should. A narrator starts preambling, I mean, rambling and then admits they don't know when the story starts or they don't know how to start a story. I groan. The purpose of this ingenious literary technique? I don't know, perhaps to warn the reader that this novel might not be as good as a cover and some hype?

First thing said:

"Hi, Maggie!"

Verdict: Fail

Obviously this book was not written with me in mind, and so I can't help but feel a sense of exclusion and isolation. Is this book bullying me?

Sincerely,
Rudy Globird