Bea Fitzgerald - Then Things Went Dark

Six people land on a desert island ready to make their reality show debut. The contestants are suitably glamorous and dramatic—and also hungry to prove themselves. The stakes are high, and with millions of viewers watching, losing is not an option. But three weeks and eighteen episodes later, five of the six contestants sit in a Portuguese police station, none of them winners.
Twelve million people were watching when Rhys Sutton died on camera, and someone must pay for the crime. The best friend, the rival, the girlfriend, the lover, and the sworn enemy are left standing. And of course, no one is talking. But how do you keep secrets when the world has been watching? Especially when, just a day before his murder, Rhys was the most hated man on television.

Comment: I was seduced into trying this book for the single reason that the setting was in an isolated island near my country. I was quite curious to see how this would matter, so I've convinced my buddy read friend to try it. Well, what a failure!

There is a new reality show promising to keep up the demand of social media called Iconic. Six contestants are going to be in a house, in an isolated island, to win a lot of money. Each one is there for a specific reason but this is a competition, so which ones will last until the end while dealing with the others and behaving in a way to garner popularity? The problem is that one of them ends up dead and the producers want to air the final episode, but what it will mean for the police investigation?

Perhaps I'll start by saying that, as probably everyone at some point with a TV, I also watched the first reality show ever aired in my country, Big Brother. It was a novelty! It had its moments but then when the second edition aired, it was a little less interesting and so on, until the point that, for me, reality shows with people inside a house/place no longer appeal. Thus, I knew the premise of this book would not be that great for me but I hoped the setting and the obvious? thriller aspect of investigating a murder would grab my attention.

I think the author really wanted to convey the reality show vibe and she achieved it by writing the story as if one were watching the show, meaning that everything we see is perfectly fitting to a movie adaptation or something, and there wasn't much on character development or character interaction. these elements were, i suppose, made to be subtle and inferred, but I failed to make a connection with the characters. There wasn't any real emotional equivalent and I kept thinking that the author really achieved the usual superficiality we tend to categorize these shows.

The six contestants are all beautiful, of course, of a certain young age and with some kind of scandal or popular situation in their background. I won't name them and write about them because I think this barely matters in the big scheme but let me say they are presented in a certain way and the stereotype never changes for any of them. They have to perform tasks and challenges, just like in any real show, but while I believe this was meant for us to see and analyze their behavior and personality, it actually felt repetitive and ridiculous. I don't think having detailed examples of their tasks was that important since they never "learned" anything.

I was also quite disappointed with the choice of setting. Why an isolated island, this plot could have happened in any TV studio made for these shows, because the only references to the island and the country were minimal and almost pointless. The setting could have been anywhere else. It also proved that the cover and the premise of an island and the suggestion these elements would matter is wrong, because nothing really important, plot wise, happened because of this, or in consequence of those elements existing. There was certainly no matching thriller content.

The story is divided into chapters named "episodes" as if we are watching an episode at a time of the show. To bad I've found the episodes very thin and without real interest, but then, at the end of each episode, we have a little bit of police investigation regarding the death of one of the contestants. The book had also started with a sort of prologue where we get to see the death had already occurred and the others were held for police interrogations. Honestly, the police investigation should not be named as such, there's nothing procedural about what we see regarding this, and even the police members themselves are bordering on pointless... the author should have omitted these sections, in my opinion.

As for the end of the book, where we learn how Rhys died and what led to it and so on, it wasn't the show (get it?) I imagined it would be, but the end itself was incredibly trivial, without any kind of real impact. I can't understand if the author wanted to shock with how easy everything happened or if it was really a matter of poor planning. Either way, I was not impressed.

Grade: 4/10