Here I Come by V.L. Banx | Book Review

Plot Summary (spoiler-free)

Shelley works the last night of the season at Hemlock Farm, a family-friendly haunted attraction that gets a lot less friendly after dark. She plays a bloody patient in a mad doctor’s lab, her best friend Mara swings a chainsaw with no chain on it, and together they send groups of terrified strangers out into the corn maze in worse shape than they came in. It’s the one place Shelley gets to be who she is. Her boyfriend Derrick hates Halloween, so he’s never seen any of it, and tonight she’s given him an ultimatum. Show up, or we have a bigger problem.

Meanwhile the county has its own Halloween tradition. For ten years, one night a year, a masked killer they call the Trentmoor Terror has gutted somebody awful and left the evidence on the body. People whisper about him, post about him, and quietly cheer him on. Mara is openly thirsty for him. Shelley says she isn’t, and then tells us she is.

You can see where this is going from the blurb. A masked man walks into the barn while Shelley is waiting for her boyfriend, and she decides it must be him. What I didn’t expect was how fast it moves. The first thirteen pages are setup and banter, then the story hands over to the second narrator and basically doesn’t slow down until the last page. It’s short enough to read in one sitting, and I think that’s the right size for it.

Character Development

Shelley is an actress stuck in the Midwest, she loves Halloween more than anyone else she knows, and she’s been hiding it from the man she lives with because he can’t stand it. That small, sad detail tells you a lot about her. She keeps buying candy for the trick-or-treaters every year and it sits unopened. I felt that more than I expected to in a book where someone gets tied to a bench in the first fifty pages.

I like how her head works when things go wrong. She talks herself into things in real time. At one point she decides that what’s happening “doesn’t count as cheating,” and about three paragraphs later she decides that it absolutely does, and both thoughts show up in the middle of being scared out of her mind and extremely turned on. It’s messy and funny and it reads like a real person panicking, not a heroine being brave. There’s also a short moment where she works out that the man she’s been with never agreed to anything either, and she follows that thought one step further than I thought the book would go. I was glad it was there.

The killer gets his own chapters, and his voice is a total contrast. He’s tired. He burns his gloves in a pile of ash, grumbles about the nickname the papers gave him, and decides in the middle of a paragraph that Trentmoor Trashman sounds stupid and he’ll stay with Terror. Then he meets Shelley and the same man discovers he has a praise kink and spends several pages being unable to think about anything else. That swing made me laugh out loud. There’s a loss in his past that drives everything he does, and it gets a couple of pages, which is enough to make him more than a costume. Not much more, but enough.

The power gap between them is real and the book knows it. He has the knife, the mask, and the head start. She’s tied up and blindfolded for most of their time together. The story handles it by letting her stay half in charge of her own reactions, and by dropping the line “none of those are our safe-word” at a moment when she’s begging him to stop and clearly isn’t meaning it. That works for me inside this kind of fantasy, though I understand a reader who finds the whole setup too much to get past.

Mara gets a few great lines. Watching her pin a laughing customer to the exam table mid-scare, chainsaw still revving, and tell him she was going to make him beg before changing her mind, is the exact kind of silly I came for. She’s the friend every haunted-house actress should have, and I wanted more of her. Derrick is barely there. He’s described as kind, tender and gorgeous, and that’s mostly all I learned about him, which makes the ultimatum feel lopsided. I never got a reason to root for him or against him.

Themes

The question the book keeps poking at is “what if they deserved it?” It’s literally an italicized thought on page 24, and it’s the whole mood of the county. Everyone knows the Terror only kills people who earned it, with files and evidence left behind, so nobody asks whether it’s right. It’s a comfortable fantasy, and the book mostly leans into the comfort. I noticed that nobody in the story seriously tests it. The one person who half-does, Shelley, gets distracted before she can get anywhere. A reader who wants a moral argument won’t find one here. A reader who wants to enjoy a killer who only hurts the worst people will be happy.

The county’s relationship with its own killer is an interesting thing the story does with this idea. The county detective has started using him as a kind of marketing tool, with posters warning offenders that he’s always watching, and the local news treats each new headline like a seasonal event. People post about him before the Trick-or-Treating hours are even over, and Mara can’t stop checking her phone. It’s a small, sharp detail about how a town can learn to love what it ought to be asking questions about. Fear and desire sit very close together, and the book never pretends otherwise. Shelley’s arousal and her terror arrive in the same breath, and the story is honest that the two feel alike from the inside. It’s the real engine of the middle section. Nothing here is subtle about it.

Masks come up constantly. Shelley performs for a living, the killer hides behind burlap, and the whole farm is a place where everyone puts on a face for strangers. There’s a quiet idea underneath that being seen as you really are is the scariest and most appealing thing on offer. I wish the book had spent a little longer on that, because it’s more interesting than the plot’s surface.

Writing Style and Effectiveness

Alternating first-person, present-tense chapters, one for Shelley and then one for the killer, keep the story moving and give it a nice back-and-forth rhythm. The chapters are short, and most end on a small hook, which made it easy to keep turning pages. Shelley’s narration is chatty and sweary and sounds like somebody telling you what happened over a drink. The killer’s is shorter and flatter and sounds exactly like a man who has done this ten times and is bored by his own routine until he isn’t.

The sex is the main event, and there’s a lot of it. By my count it takes up close to half the story, in two long stretches. The first is an open-door scene in a hidden corner of the barn while screams carry through the thin walls. The second is a chase through the cornfield that goes much further. It’s explicit, loud, and very physical, and the author clearly wanted every kink on the content list to get a scene. Some of it works. The tying-up sequence early on has a real charge because Shelley is so confident and so wrong at the same time. But by the second stretch the vocabulary starts to repeat, the same wet, aching, can’t-stop beats show up again, and I found myself skimming a little. A few pages could come out without anyone missing them.

The gore is the other big draw, and it’s better handled. The kills are quick and grim, the cruelty is specific without lingering, and a basement scene early on set the tone well for me. It stays on the right side of fun.

The ARC still has typos. I caught “Derrik” in one spot and a couple of missing letters elsewhere, nothing that stops the story, and presumably the final copy cleans them up. One thing I enjoyed is the playlist at the front, a short list that includes Sleep Token, Lana Del Rey and the Halloween theme, which is exactly the right mood.

A small aside about the series. Every book in K!nktober: Reloaded is sold as a monster paired with a kink, with taglines like “Fae x Food Play” and “Minotaur x Hole in the Wall,” and this one’s is “Slasher x Sensory Deprivation.” That’s a fair description of what you get. The book does what its label says and doesn’t pretend to be anything bigger.

Conclusion

I had a good time with this one, and I want to be honest that it’s a light good time. It’s a novella about a woman who loves Halloween, a man who kills terrible people, and the night they share. It works best when it’s playful, and the humor is a real asset. The killer’s tired voice and Shelley’s frantic rationalizing made me laugh out loud more than once.

It’s thinner than it looks. Derrick barely registers, the ethical question gets asked and dropped, and the sex runs long enough to drag in the second half. The chase has less edge than it’s reaching for, since the tone never lets it get truly frightening. The ending is happy and a little quick. It lands on the right tone for the series, though I wanted one more beat before it closed.

If you’ve read Haunting Adeline and liked the idea of a killer who only goes after predators, this is a much lighter, sillier cousin. There’s no trafficking storyline and no real dread here, just a masked man and a woman who has been waiting all night for her boyfriend. And if the dedication to “anyone whose first crush was named Michael, Jason, or Freddy” made you smile, you’re the target reader. For the right mood and the right reader, it’s short, sharp and filthy in the way it promises to be.

Evaluation

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Writing Style: ★★★☆☆ (3/5): chatty, funny narration and a strong two-voice structure, held back by repetitive sex scenes and ARC typos

Characters: ★★★☆☆ (3/5): Shelley and the killer have real personality, Mara is a delight, Derrick is hardly on the page

World-Building: ★★★☆☆ (3/5): the haunted farm is vivid and fun, the county’s legend gets only a few lines of backstory

Spice Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5): frequent and very explicit, close to half the story

Trigger warnings: Halloween night, haunted attraction, open door sex, sensory deprivation, chase/stalking scene, masked MMC, ultimatum, foreign object DP, murder (of pedophiles), guts & gore, use of acid as a violent weapon, minor knife play, CNC (consent non-consent), vague cheating.

Recommended for readers who like their dark romance playful, who grew up on slasher movies, and who will happily read a one-sitting novella built around a masked killer and a brave, unlucky girlfriend. If you liked Haunting Adeline but wanted a funnier, lighter version, start here. Skip it if you need a deep emotional arc or a serious moral argument.