Oh how much I wanted to love this book! The sports setting was not my favourite, so I was skipping them to read the actual story behind “Daphne” which was great!! I have enjoyed Malerman’s books before, but this is not one of them!

Thank you publisher via Netgalley for the arc.

Thank you to Random House and Netgalley for an advanced copy of Daphne.

Daphne is a menacing woman lurking about the town's collective memory and Malerman seeks to tell what happens when the community tries to ignore their biggest nightmare. The book was okay though not the most frightful of Malerman's works.

Maybe if this would have been a short story I would have enjoyed it more. I found it to be overly long and boring. There are some tense parts but this is far from horror and not very thrilling. I would pass on this one and pick up another book by Malerman.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy in exchange for an honest review.

She sees you when your sleeping she knows when your awake. Daphne is truly terrifying and Malerman has done it again. The slow creeping horror. I love that Daphne was this omnipresent myth lingering around until it wasn't so much a myth anymore. Thank you to Del Rey for the advanced copy

There is nothing scarier than a woman scorned. Maybe that’s why my husband keeps me happy 😉 you know the saying “happy wife, happy life.”

Every now and again I love to dip my toes into the “horror” genre . I’m left breathless and terrified while trembling under the bed and good gosh I wouldn’t want it any other way! Then I take a few months to recover before picking up another equally terrifying book.

Daphne

Ugh, the last time I was this scared was while watching IT earlier this year .

The body count starts piling up and each one more gruesome than the last. This book is perfect for all blood bath chasers.

If you’re looking to scare the heck out of yourself, Daphne is perfect for you .

I finished this book in one sitting and was left completely in awe. Not just from the well orchestrated plot but also from the exceptional writing style.

Before I spoil the ending I will leave you with a little teaser :

It’s the last summer for Kit Lamb: The last summer before college. The last summer with her high school basketball team, and with Dana, her best friend. The last summer before her life begins.

But the night before the big game, one of the players tells a ghost story about Daphne, a girl who went to their school many years ago and died under mysterious circumstances. Some say she was murdered, others that she died by her own hand. And some say that Daphne is a murderer herself. They also say that Daphne is still out there, obsessed with revenge, and will appear to kill again anytime someone thinks about her.

After Kit hears the story, her teammates vanish, one by one, and Kit begins to suspect that the stories about Daphne are real . . . and to fear that her own mind is conjuring the killer. Now it’s a race against time as Kit searches for the truth behind the legend and learns to face her own fears—before the summer of her lifetime becomes the last summer of her life.

My thanks to NetGalley for providing this to me for review.. This is the 4th novel I've read from Josh Malerman (not counting the poignant novella, The House at the Bottom of a Lake). I enjoyed Bird Box the best, but this one makes a strong case for second place among Black Mad Wheel and Malorie, with a few major caveats.

Daphne feels like something in the vein of the Asian horror boom in the wake of Ringu. The story revolves around a high school girls'basketball team, anxiety, and a town unconsciously complicit in the erasure of its memory of the mysterious Daphne. When one of the girls tells a ghost story about Daphne the night before their big game, and how this 7-foot monstrosity will appear and kill anyone who thinks about her, the terror begins. Because once you start thinking about such a supernatural threat that manifests in reality, how can you stop?

Kit is the star player, a girl who struggles with anxiety and can't help fixating on Daphne and the uncertainty of the future. She is our lead character, often through journal entries. There is also a detective investigating the case when the basketball team starts to turn up dead one at a time, a woman with a propensity for overstepping the law to get results. The other ball players receive a brief sketch of background and personality before they run afoul of Daphne in cinematically eerie and gruesome fashions. There's more telling than showing with some of the relationships, but it works well enough. There's a YA feel to the proceedings.

The book moves fast with the atmosphere of inevitable doom you get from the Ju-On/The Grudge series--once the curse targets someone, it's just a matter of time. You wonder how the novel can resolve such a powerful threat in a satisfying way. If you suspect it probably won't, you are correct. If you think you can probably go along with it anyway and it won't make you wonder why an editor didn't laugh and send it back with a note reading, "No, seriously, where's the real ending?", well, you're sorely mistaken. In basketball parlance, the climax isn't just a brick...it's a total airball. I'm not the type to dwell on the ending and usually consider them to be of secondary importance, but this one is undeniably a major disappointment, where I feel like almost anything else would have been better and should have been tried. 

Making the horror a 7-foot female monstrosity essentially crushing these girls to death is a novel idea, although the book's insistence on the viability of a female threat being as believable as a male assailant becomes distracting in the proliferation of women in every dominant role. The coach...the detective...the principal...the chief of police...the grocery store manager...every non parental authority figure in the book. It's a thematic conceit that becomes glaring contrivance, particularly in the dubious assertion that the girls' basketball team "always" beats the boys' team. The boys--who would uniformly be taller, stronger, and faster--aren't losing every game to their female counterparts...probably not any of them. There are also some absurd moments someone should have questioned, like the phrase DAPHNE LIVES proclaimed to have been written behind the refrigerator in a break room. Why would anyone know this?

Still, the build-up and appearances of Daphne are intriguing and satisfying enough to keep the book entertaining, and unsatisfying as it is, the ending does at least carry the specter of doom beyond the pages. This could easily make for an enjoyable J-horror type film....ideally with a new ending.

An interesting horror novel that creates a new, unique villain. I saw this being marketed as both Adult and Young Adult - I think while there are many Adult novels that can have teens as the main characters, I do feel like this is more of a Young Adult novel. I did enjoy this, but I think I would have liked it even better if it skewed more adult.

This was a real page-turning slasher style story. It was interesting to see a main character with anxiety shown is such great detail.

(Almost) Everything about this book was just perfect. The atmosphere that makes you intrigued in everything that goes through, with the different povs and characters, Kit's journal, the plotwists, how each one of them reacts to whats happening. There's little I can complain about.

"Daphne" is a local story, a woman whose name you can't think or else she will come for you. In the book, we have two main povs, Kit's, a girl with severe anxiety that's trying everything to not think about "her" and, a police officer, an outsider that's trying to understand what story the town is hiding.

This book will forever be in my head, I've got so into it that I don't even want to think about her name, you know, just in case. The one thing I'm kind of not content with is the ending, till that point everything was very fast paced a lot of action, and that scene felt very rushed, I liked it (I think) but I think the way it was told just didn't work out that well, especially knowing how everything was going (perfectly). But, overall, I loved it, especially the part where Kit's anxiety came through, it truly would be hell for me if someone told me a story like this....

This was so different than I expected in really great ways. I've only read one other Malerman before this one, and I'll definitely be seeking out more of them.

This is the story of a town, an old legend, and a girls basketball team and how all three of these things thread into each other other like the woven fibers of a throw. Mostly the details are there, the pattern threadbare and worn, the colors blotchy or uneven in places where the wool wasn't matched as well as the weaver set out for it to be, and a face too indistinct to be made out in the dark but present enough to be on your mind as you skate across the room for a drink of water late at night though you know it's just the stupid throw. Just like with the throw, you get the picture, you make out the lines of the story, you like the scenes, understand the characters and even the overall message but you just can't seem to invest in the idea of feeling completely comfortable precisely because there's too much that throws you off about it.

Daphne isn't a terrible book at all, I'm certainly there are many who will enjoy it without any qualms, but it did keep pushing me to arms length as I was trying to read that first third and then again as the final quarter was rolling into the last couple of minutes of the ending. Some things work well, particularly in the middle where many of the details were established and many of the gears are rolling nicely enough for things to be well in motion, but it's hard not to get frustrated with the repeated themes with limited basis at the beginning and not all the elements of the full reveal are as well sunk as I think the reader needed them to be for a full and satisfying meal for all our efforts getting there. We do get there, but I do wish the beginning elements had been grounded with character experience instead of journal entries and headspace narratives for a lot of the leading work and that some of the final trappings hadn't felt quite so loose they might come apart if they were handled harder by a stricter reader.

Based on two other books of the author, I was looking forward to reading this book. However, I didn't like it at all. To begin with, I didn't enjoy reading the journal entries of what appeared to be a girl having a mental breakdown due to very high levels of anxiety. Secondly, the plot was ridiculous. And in the end, we never actually learned how or what Daphne is/happened. His message seems to be that you can be/do anything that you set your mind to. In my opinion, don't waste your time.

I really struggled in the beginning with this one. It started a little slow for me and I had trouble with the characters. I'm glad I stuck with it because it did get wild and good further in.

Big thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Josh Malerman is really hit or miss with me and this one was unfortunately a miss. The premise was promising but I found the characterizations, descriptions, and POV changes rough and clunky. There was also way too much about basketball for a distinctly not-sports-book.

Goblin will remain my favorite Malerman.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Random House/Ballantine for the e-book!
Daphne is the story of a high school girls’ basketball team learning of ghost tale that spreads through the suburban town of Samhattan, Michigan.
This was my first Josh Malerman read and I have mixed feelings on it. It gave me very camp PG-13 horror movie vibes during the first half. The teen coming of age and basketball centric aspects were cringeworthy but seemed essential to the trope and plot line. The middle was a fast paced page turning point for me and built the ending up to be underwhelming. The twist was surprisingly unexpected but the falling action immediately fell off from there, trying to do way too much and losing its momentum.

⭐⭐⭐


𝙃𝙤𝙧𝙧𝙤𝙧 𝙝𝙖𝙨 𝙖 𝙣𝙚𝙬 𝙣𝙖𝙢𝙚: 𝘿𝙖𝙥𝙝𝙣𝙚. 𝘼 𝙗𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙖𝙡, 𝙚𝙣𝙞𝙜𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙘 𝙬𝙤𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙠𝙨 𝙖 𝙝𝙞𝙜𝙝 𝙨𝙘𝙝𝙤𝙤𝙡 𝙗𝙖𝙨𝙠𝙚𝙩𝙗𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙩𝙚𝙖𝙢 𝙞𝙣 𝙖 𝙧𝙚𝙞𝙢𝙖𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙡𝙖𝙨𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙧𝙚 𝙗𝙮 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙉𝙚𝙬 𝙔𝙤𝙧𝙠 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝙗𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙨𝙚𝙡𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙝𝙤𝙧 𝙤𝙛 𝘽𝙞𝙧𝙙 𝘽𝙤𝙭.

After finishing this I’m still super confused with what I actually read. This is the second book I’ve read by Josh Malerman - Bird Box being the other. I really liked the premise of this book, it sounded right up my alley and like something I would love.

I’m not super big on Basketball. I have played before, but my knowledge of the actual sport is terrible. I went into this one expecting nothing, only because Josh Malerman threw me in a whirlwind with Bird Box. In Daphne, we follow seventeen-year-old Kit Lamb who is obsessed with Basketball. She’s super excited to go to college next year. Kit has played basketball for years with her friends who are all super close with one another. I loved the connection between them and the fact that they were super close and connected with each other.

This book is deeper as our MC deals with anxiety, Kit is super quiet about it and doesn’t tell anyone. She doesn’t truly understand what anxiety is and thinks she’s less than others because of it.

The night before a big game the girl’s basketball team has a sleepover where one girl tells the spooky story of this ostracized girl who was creepy looking and lived in her car, where she would play heavy metal music. The story ends with the girl dying in her car. Rumors are going around that she was murdered, while others say it was due to natural causes. But no one truly knows the real story of this girl… Daphne.

Because the girls never heard of the story before, they're doubtful and don’t believe in it. However, soon afterward the girls begin to get brutally murdered one by one… no one knows why and Kit’s anxiety gets worse and worse as she doesn’t know when her time will come.

This story was all over the place, I was not expecting it to be as deep as it was but it had a very deep and meaningful message of anxiety. While it was horror, it also felt like a coming-of-age story with Kit dealing with her anxiety. The gore in this was super creepy and the “tale” was scary. This was a quick read, but I struggled with really understanding what I had read as it was so unique. I got lost in between with everything going on, it wasn’t what I was expecting. Nonetheless, I would still recommend this book. I would just advise looking up trigger warnings, especially if you can relate to anxiety and panic attacks.

I was really excited to read this because I have loved other Josh Malerman and I tried reading this from the beginning twice and just couldn’t get into it unfortunately

A phenomenal horror read, perfect for anyone with anxiety. They way Malerman intertwined psychological horror with a real monster element was perfect. This was clearly a personal book for the author to write and I am so glad he did. The way this perfectly captured what it's like to be haunted by your own mind was something I have never seen done so well. Loved it!!

I thought this story was going to be so great. However, I’ve noticed that Josh Malerman stories are pretty hit-or-miss. This was a miss. I think this could have been a really great short story but it just kept dragging on. I did not care about any of the characters and absolutely hated the diary entries.

I really struggled getting through majority of this book. I felt nothing for the main character Kit, and felt she had no substantial personality. Automatically because of this I didn’t really care about her fate which isn’t great when it comes to a slasher. The main reason you keep reading is to see if that character lives. If you don’t care for them then that drive for reading is immediately a non factor. Also Samhattan… really? I very rarely roll my eyes at town names but this one got me. It was made even worse with the constant use of Samhattanite. All of these things were minor when compared to my main problem with the book which is that the journal entries weren’t need in my honest opinion. All they did was slow the book down. They were meant to show what anxiety is like and I suppose they did this, but surely there would’ve been a better way. All of this being said the kill scenes were awesome and the ending was actually pretty good. Pair this with the police detectives point of view sections (which I loved), and I consider this to be a low 3 star read.