Find Him Where You Left Him Dead by Kristen Simmons is a story of five friends that started to play a game their freshman year. Only four remain after one of them doesn't survive and they all go their separate ways. Now that they are seniors, the ghost of their dead friend reunites them in the place where the game began to try to bring him home. The game takes them out of this world into the Japanese underworlds where they have to complete seven challenges to be able to make it back home. Will the estranged friends be able to reconcile their differences long enough to complete the challenges?

This book has been described as "Jumanji but Japanese-inspired" and that sums it up perfectly. I really enjoyed the integration of Japanese folklore into this YA horror novel. The mood during the entire story is very tense and there are lots of twists and turns and of course teenage drama. Although it did feel as some information (specifically the origin of the "game"), but it did not really impact the story for me I thought this was a fun, unique, fast paced read.

I thought the narrator did a good job differentiating between characters and even had some fun voices for the unique characters that they run into throughout the book.

Four years ago Maddy, Emerson, Oliver, Dax, and Ian went exploring in a nearby cave. Only four of them came out.

Now, the four survivors are being visited by Ian's ghost telling them they must finish what they started. So Maddy, Emerson, Oliver, and Dax head back to the beginning in what turns out to be a high stakes, game in an alternate dimension known as Meido. Once the four are pulled in, they must play until the end or risk winding up caught in the game just like Ian.

I wasn't quite prepared for what this story ended up turning into. It started out like an eerie, creepy ghost story. I thought it was perfect as we get into the Fall time of year with Halloween on the horizon.

But when we get into the story, it felt like a send up of Jumanji with Japanese Folklore. I know going back and reading the synopsis (which I honestly hadn't done since I first heard about the book) it's pretty clearly laid out. Still, it was a surprise for me. I almost wish we had stayed in the creepy realm a little bit but when putting it into a context of a game, I wasn't as shocked or surprised by the various twists and turns. Maybe there would have been more benefit in keeping the true nature of expectation a mystery for a while until the quartet is truly ensconced within Meido a bit more. Because as it stands it's as though there's an early objective, and that is to get the characters back to Meido in any way shape or form. For me, this clearly causes issues with some of the plot threads. A lot of chance, a lot of happenstance. A lot of kind of turning a blind eye to the aspects that don't add up because that's just the way things need to be in order for the story to progress.

I felt from the onset that we, the readers, are dropped in the middle of the story. There's very little initial exposition given as to what happened four years ago and how that moment has gotten our characters to where we see them in the beginning. Instead that past information is built up through flashbacks and ruminations. I think this was smart because it really sets a fast pace which easily pulls you into the story. Plus, once we know the full extent of what happened then, for me, I was able to piece together a little bit more that's actually revealed as a twist down the line.

I liked that each character is so distinctly themselves and we're kind of seeing how each has been impacted by Ian's disappearance. Maddy threw herself into the swim team, Emerson quit school and sits at home gaming from sun-up until sundown. Oliver decided to make himself as popular as possible by joining the theater club at school so everyone knows his face. Dax also dropped out and spends most of his time playing his music in the coffeeshop - also the group's former hangout.

Their relationships with each other are so central to everything that happens and everything that happened. The impact wouldn't be felt as much if these were random kids all finding themselves stuck in Meido. It means something that they are together and it means something that they used to be friends and Meido has essentially broken them all up. Their connection and trust will be what gets them through or also potentially what condemns them all.

The atmosphere is hectic throughout and I feel like sometimes this makes the story difficult to visualize while reading. Even with all of that, however, the four main characters are like anchors keeping the story, for all intents and purposes, grounded. The chapters switch points of view between Maddy, Emerson, Oliver, and Dax.

There were moments I was surprised by the choice of viewpoint for certain sections because often those characters wouldn't be the main focus. I found this a lot with Emerson and Maddy's sections early on. For example, you would think Maddy being the main viewpoint she would have the most action during that chapter, but then things would be more focused on Emerson and I would wonder why we weren't getting her perspective instead, it felt a bit muddied sometimes like maybe those were edits made at one point but not everything caught up.

I like the dual narration. I wish we could have gotten different narrators for each character but I thought that two was great in switching between the male and female characters. I thought that they both did so well making sure each character's affectations were there even when they were narrating for a different character.

This story is definitely setup as more-to-come. That becomes clearer as you get toward the end and realize that unless Kristen Simmons wants to leave a lot of open threads on purpose, then there is going to be follow-up. I feel both ways about it. The true ending is so tantalizing for what could come next, but I'm also often a fan of a single story even when not everything is tied up with a bow. Don't get me wrong, I will most definitely be picking up the next book.

If you're looking for a book to reading leading into the new season, I think this is a perfect place to start.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Kristen Simmons for providing me with a complimentary digital ARC audiobook for Find Him Where You Left Him Dead coming out September 26, 2023. The honest opinions expressed in this review are my own.

Four years ago, five kids started a game. Not all of them survived.

Now, at the end of their senior year of high school, the survivors―Owen, Madeline, Emerson, and Dax―have reunited for one strange and terrible reason: they’ve been summoned by the ghost of Ian, the friend they left for dead.

Together they return to the place where their friendship ended with one goal: find Ian and bring him home. So they restart the deadly game they never finished―an innocent card-matching challenge called Meido. A game without instructions.

As soon as they begin, they're dragged out of their reality and into an eerie hellscape of Japanese underworlds, more horrifying than even the darkest folktales that Owen's grandmother told him. There, they meet Shinigami, an old wise woman who explains the rules:

They have one night to complete seven challenges or they'll all be stuck in this world forever.

This is the first book I’ve encountered by this author. I had high hopes for it and the first half was really good. Things got a little muddled in the second half. The characters became a little too similar and it was hard to tell them apart. I didn’t have a real attachment to any of the characters. I wasn’t a fan of the ending. I’m a big fan of Japanese horror and folklore and survival game stories. I think the stories can be really creepy and fun, but this one didn’t really do it for me. I was expecting some creepier elements. There’s some reviews comparing it to Jumanji, but it wasn’t really like that for me.

This is definitely a creepy read and perfect for spooky season! I just struggled to connect to the characters. They seemed one dimensional which made it hard for me to get invested into the story and took a bit for me to. I did like the twist tho!

Find Him Where You Left Him Dead by Kristen Simmons is a creepy and extremely intriguing Japanese-inspired novel where we follow a group of high school seniors as the find themselves inside a game where they have one night to complete a series of challenges or else risk being stuck in the game.

This book had me wishing I could watch the OG Jumanji and had a similar vibe and feel to the All of Us Villains duology. I enjoyed this immensely. I thought the plot was not just extremely complex but very well done. There was a light touch of social commentary with discussions on race and queerness which I found quite refreshing as the cast of characters were of different sexualities (ACE, Demi, Achillean, etc) and color. Because of the plot's imposed time limit, it was action-packed and always forward moving and I had a lot of fun with this book.

My one gripe with this novel is that it took me far too long to become invested in these characters. I think because of how forward-moving the plot was and how many characters we flipped perspectives on, there never really was enough time to build into who these kids were. There was a lack of exposition on the character's personality traits and their differences until much, much later on in the novel when certain tasks required a lot of reflection into their actions and choices.

I think also the flashbacks added to the lack of distinct narrative voices between the characters cause not only did we have four different POVs to follow, but we also had two separate timelines to keep track of. It is a most definitely a highly ambitious novel, and while for the most part it did deliver, as a charactr-driven reader it lacked quite a bit on this front.

Nonetheless, this was a really fun novel and I highly recommend adding it to your October TBR. It’s sufficiently creepy, the vibes are immaculate, the representation is great, and the book was really entertaining.

Thank you to Netgalley, Macmillan Audio, and Macmillan Young Listeners for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Man I did not enjoy this one bit. Let's go over the problems.

1. My biggest problem was the Japanese and the Japanese stories used in this novel. I don't proclaim to fluently speak Japanese, but I do know more than this author. There was only one full sentence in Japanese in this story and it was grammatically incorrect to the point that I dissected the wrongness of it to many different people. This next part is not the author's fault; neither of the audiobook's narrators spoke Japanese. That was painfully obvious throughout the entire book as they pronounced the words just as terribly as the characters would have in the story. I would say it was intentional but it definitely was not. It didn't feel like any of the Japanese elements were used properly. It read like an American who heard a little about Shinto/folk stories from Japan and decided they sounded <i>cool</i> and wanted to include it them their book. The representations of Tengu were not necessarily wrong but just rubbed me the wrong way because they have key identifying features that were ignored for <i>scary bird</i>. The entire seven trials of Meido were directly pulled from the original stories with only a bit of reimagining. Overall it felt like a poorly researched book that just pulled whatever it wanted from these original stories and cobbled them together in a way that was quite difficult to follow.

2. The actual book itself lacks painfully from context. Not knowing the key stories behind all of these characters and tales brought into this book just makes it confusing and difficult to follow. And if you do know the stories you just cringe at the way they were depicted.

3. The characters were all stock characters with nothing interesting about them. I didn't care if any of them lived or died.

4. Finally, this one is completely biased but horror books that purely rely on gore-fest to be <i>scary</i> are my least favorite type. I want horror to be unsettling, haunting. I want to walk away thinking about it for the rest of my life. I want morality to be brought into question. I want to question my own self. Reading about people getting chopped up or cannibalism isn't horror, it's just gross.

However, this author has some potential for stories dealing with grief and loss with a little dash of fantasy in the mix. There were some elements of the story at the very end that actually caught me by surprise with how moving and interesting they were. Here was her writing ability shining through. Perhaps the horror genre wasn't for her. Perhaps that was the problem.

Overall I really didn't enjoy this book and I feel that that is a shame because I can tell that this was a heritage writer who wanted to connect with a culture she feels disconnected from. I would say in the future more research and explanation of the stories used for inspiration. She left this one off like there would be another book and I will say with certainty that I have no interest in picking it up.

Content warning: body horror, spiders, blood, mind control, being trapped in small spaces, mental health struggles

2.5 stars rounded up to 3.

So FIND HIM WHERE YOU LEFT HIM DEAD is being promoted as a horror Jumanji mixed with Japanese mythology. And while those elements are there, I guess I expected more Jumanji-style plot points than we got. I also wish that Simmons had better explained the card game Meido. As a reader, it felt like we were missing something that would allow the plot as a whole to make more sense. This ended up being more mystery/thriller than horror for me, but that might just be my take on it.

I liked the concept, I thought the plot twist at the end was interesting (though it leaves this book on a cliffhanger of sorts and I thought this was a standalone so that's somewhat annoying), but unfortunately, the characters felt flat. Because of that, it was hard to get invested in what was happening.

It's a quick read, but I was hoping for more out of it based on the synopsis.

Cia Court and Paul Dateh do a decent job with the audiobook narration, though there wasn't enough of a difference in voices to make it easy to know which POV you were on unless you paid close attention to the start of the chapter.

Advanced Reader’s Copy provided by NetGalley, Macmillan Audio, and Macmillan Young Listeners in exchange for an honest review.

welp...this book happened.

I'll first say I enjoyed Simmons writing style. I would give her another chance.
BUT, maybe it's a me problem, but there were too many characters for me to comprehend who was who. And there was A LOT of information going on in about 50% of the book. There were points I was so confused to whaqt was going on. The characters were just a mish mash of characters for me. sorry.

I hope I hope I hope there is going to be a book two!

This was an excellent spooky season read. It is creepy with the best twist and turns along the way. There is a dash of romance in there. Which my little romance having heart appreciated.

I loved the twist with how to complete the challenges along with who lead them there. Everything about this book and world is too notch!!!

So this book is described as "Jumanji, but Japanese inspired" and that's what it delivered.
4 years ago, 5 friends went into a cave and only 4 came out. Ian was left behind and no one knows what happened to him. He was left for dead. 4 years later, Ian haunts the friends who have not spoken in years and they all come together and go back to the cave. They get sucked into a Japanese inspired Jumanji type game where they need to complete 7 challenges before sunrise or be stuck in this alternate world forever.
The characters in this book were ok. No one really stuck with me, but they were all good characters. We get all POVs Madeline, Emerson, Dax and Owen. Madeline and Emerson were best friends but grew to dislike each other after Ian's disappearance. Dax seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. None of them talk to one another anymore. It was a fun dynamic between them, like a forced proximity but with friendship instead of romance. They had to work together to complete the challenges and face the discord between one another.
The atmosphere of this book was fantastic. I was immediately pulled into the book when Madeline is in the pool at school and sees Ian's ghost. Then he visits the other characters and it's just incredibly creepy and fantastic. Once we get to the cave, we are transported to this crazy, intricate world that is just so out there in the best way.
The plot is fun. I love Jumanji, so it was definitely a hit. The challenges were weird and revealing and uncomfortable and at the end, very eye opening and unexpected. The ending did go a little fast, I actually had to rewind the audiobook because it felt like I missed a lot when it had only been a little bit. The very last sentence actually gave me goosebumps and made me itch for a sequel!
There were 2 narrators and they were both fantastic. They did a great job bringing the story to life.

I think this book had some really interesting elements. I liked the game format, it was fast paced and the monsters in the story were truly terrifying. It was fast paced and I think there are a lot of readers who will love this book! I personally don't play video games and am not into Japanese horror/mythology so those parts of the story would've been more interesting if I had prior knowledge or a connection to those things. I will recommend it to patrons!

When I read that this book was like Jumanji but with Japanese inspired folklore, I was absolutely sold. Having read it, I can tell you that is quite literally the best description for this book, and it was a wild ride!

I was fully into the plot of this group of teens delving into a mysterious, deadly world of challenges in an attempt to save their friend trapped in the game. The different challenges they had to complete were fascinating and spooky, but I will say I didn't feel particularly invested in any of the characters as individuals. Additionally, while the ending reveals were interesting, they happened so quickly that there was little time to process them before the story ended...though I do believe it clearly sets up a sequel, and one I would read.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this arc in exchange for my honest review.

Find Him Where You Left Him Dead is a book that really hooked me with the premise but then failed to fully draw me in with its execution. The story follows a group of young adults who started a game when they were kids. One of them did not survive and the surviving four lied and were haunted by their decision. Four years later the ghost of their friend that didn’t make it summons them to finish the game they all started years ago.

I love that idea. A game that turned deadly and a ghost that brings them back to play the deadly game. On top of that, there were a lot of references to their situation being like a video game. This was everything I should have loved but it just lacked a sense of maturity and urgency for me to be fully invested.

None of the characters really stood out and spoke to me. I found myself forgetting who was who and not caring about who would live and who would die.

The saving grace of this book was the Japanese mythology. The game they play is centered around it and that part was always interesting and it felt very well researched.

I have to be honest and say I read this a few days ago and I am already starting to forget. I loved the ending. but everything else is starting to escape me. It is a fast pace book and it very easy to binge it. I think the age group this book is meant for will love it. Love the creepiness, the unraveling of the mystery.

This book was advertised as a Japanese folklore Jumanji and it delivers on it. I didn’t think everything was totally explained and there were some big logic leaps but overall this was a fun, creepy story. I didn’t really like any of the characters and would have liked them to all be developed a little more. I didn’t feel like I felt much of a difference in the voices of the kids (although I did think he narrator did a good job trying to bring them to life). Maddie, Owen, Emerson, and Dax used to be close friends but when their friend Ian disappeared they all drifted apart. It’s been 4 years when they have a visit from an impossible visitor they come back together. When Ian went missing they had started a game and it turns out they need to finish that game to save him but only if they can finish the game before dawn (why this revelation didn’t come for 4 years I have no idea).

This book does not hold back on the creepy imagery.m! The author is committed to getting you to reach for that nightlight. And I loved that.

I also liked to Japanese Jumanji type horror game element but I had a hard time being endeared to the characters and the writing felt very young adult, which is a genre I sometimes struggle with. I wish there had been more finesse in the world building of the game rather than just dunking the reader in.

The narrator was very animated and did a good job!

Thank you to Netgalley and Tor Teen for an ARC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

For me, Find Him Where You Left Him Dead by Kristen Simmons was one of those books with an amazing premise and a lackluster execution. The summary sounds exciting with the characters being forced to return to a location where they left their friend for dead years before and vowed never to tell the truth of what happened. They are forced to play a game centered in Japanese mythology to get their friend back and to get out alive themselves. This should have been an edge of your seat story. Unfortunately, the characters, dynamics, and the plot itself were poorly established. As the story unfolded, I didn't care about any of the characters and therefore didn't care if they survived or continued to the next phase of the game. If anything, it was tedious. I kept hoping it would finish, repeatedly checking to see how much time remained in the audiobook.

This is such a twisted book! I read and listened to the audiobook and I enjoyed it immensely!
I loved the Japanese folklore and the mystery surrounding the game. The challenges left me on the edge of my seat.
Japanese folklore definitely gave it the creepy and horror vibes.

The narrators, Cia Court and Paul Dateh did a fantastic job in breathing life to the characters and game. I felt like I was right there fighting for my life!
I need the next one stat!

I had to stop listening to this one at 20% it really wasn't for me I didn't enjoy it, and didn't care for the characters.

Summary:

Four years ago, five kids started a game. Not all of them survived.

Now, at the end of their senior year of high school, the survivors—Owen, Madeline, Emerson, and Dax—have reunited for one strange and terrible reason: they’ve been summoned by the ghost of Ian, the friend they left for dead.

Together they return to the place where their friendship ended with one goal: find Ian and bring him home. So they restart the deadly game they never finished—an innocent card-matching challenge called Meido. A game without instructions.

As soon as they begin, they're dragged out of their reality and into an eerie hellscape of Japanese underworlds, more horrifying than even the darkest folktales that Owen's grandmother told him. There, they meet Shinigami, an old wise woman who explains the rules:

They have one night to complete seven challenges or they'll all be stuck in this world forever.

Once inseparable, the survivors now can’t stand each other, but the challenges demand they work together, think quickly, and make sacrifices—blood, clothes, secrets, memories, and worse.

And once again, not everyone will make it out alive.

My thoughts:
I wasn’t really sure what to think when I first dived into this book. I ended up really enjoying it. I ended up binge reading it.