Playground | Mini Review

Rating - ⭐⭐

"Three low-income families have been given a handsome retainer to join Geraldine Borden for a day at her cliffside estate. All the parents must do to collect the rest of their money is allow their children to test out the revolutionary playground equipment Geraldine has been working on for decades. But there’s a reason the structures in the bowels of her gothic castle have taken so long to develop—they were never meant to see the light of day.

When a band of dysfunctional children is suddenly thrust into a diabolical realm of violence, they must grow up instantly to have a chance at survival. Will they find a way to put their differences aside, or be swallowed up by the insidious architecture all around them?"

---

Playground is a standalone splatterpunk novel by Aron Beauregard.

Well, TikTok, you got me. Are you happy? I love turning to TikTok for book recommendations, and sometimes they don't pan out so well. To be fair, anyone who mentioned this book did give a warning about it, though that only served to make me more curious. I can now say that that itch was scratched, and regret has set in.

This book sure was something, alright. You already know you're in for a really rough ride when torture playground + children is the plot, but it got so much worse than that. Ironically, the violent child deaths were just the tip of the disgusting iceberg that was this book, but readers were warned about a very specific page of the book and...I get why. I'm not bothered too easily, but I almost coughed my cookies reading that page. Things that you absolutely don't want to read about were described in vivid detail and...it was not pleasant to say the least.

I know that most people rate horror books based on their effectiveness to creep you the hell out, and if I were that kind of person, this would get a higher rating, but this was nasty. Children dying violent deaths aside (with drawings just to warn you), you have a couple of just pure abominations of adults in this who in no way should be parental figures. So all around, this was a fun ride (please note the sarcasm here). The only reason I didn't give this a one-star rating was because I was rooting for the kids.

I would like to offer five pieces of advice:

• don't read this

• if you do, definitely don't eat before or during reading

• don't read this

• if you do, beware of pages 37-40 as you will want to bleach your brain

• just don't read this