How to Survive Camping: The Man With No Shadow by Bonnie Quinn

Don’t Follow the Lights!

How to Survive Camping: The Man With No Shadow originated as a series of posts by Bonnie Quinn on the No Sleep Reddit. I haven’t read the posts, but they gained a large following. She developed her ideas into this novel, which is kicking off a series. In fact, the second book comes out later this month.

The POV narrator and protagonist is Kate, the manager of the haunted Goat Valley Campground. Like earlier generations of her family, she is tasked with warning campers about the wide variety of supernatural monsters who inhabit the forest. Many of the “inhumans”, as she calls them, are evil. Others are neutral and some are even benign.

Remember how Randy in Scream lectures his friends about the rules needed to survive a horror movie? Kate has her own set of rules for surviving a camping trip at Goat Valley.

They are too numerous to list in full, but here are a few: never buy ice from children who don’t have a wagon, always accept if offered a drink from a man with a skull cup, and, whatever you do, don’t follow the lights! People who disobey the rules usually end up mangled, decapitated, or worse.

Quinn writes in a snappy, easy to read style. The writing is simple and sometimes overly repetitive, but for someone who is not a professional author (her biography says that she’s a software developer) this is certainly a respectable effort.

Just don’t pick this one up if you’re looking for something that’s challenging in a literary sense. Even Rachel Harrison’s novels have a wider vocabulary than this book. Quinn’s imagination and sense of humor give the story its spark. Give me entertainment over fancy prose any day.

The entire novel is from Kate’s point of view. She is a self-described borderline psychopath who is willing to do anything that she deems necessary for the camp, up to and including murder.

Her friend, known only as the Old Sheriff (he’s never given a proper name), looks the other way because Kate is keeping the monsters from escaping into the nearby town. However, an upstart rival, the New Sheriff, despises Kate and wants to bring her down.

Kate has a deliciously deadpan sense of humor. She has plenty of memorable quotes, including a fun observation about my favorite holiday: “The rules of how the world functions shift on Halloween. People disguise themselves as monsters. Monsters disguise themselves as humans. And boundaries grow weak as all the world becomes old land.”

A World Teeming With Monsters

The first half of the book is more like a collection of short stories than a novel. Kate relates several deadly and death-defying experiences that she and people close to her have had with the monsters. This is an effective way to world build. It introduces us to the variety of creatures who inhabit the forest, which is cool, although it did make me wonder if the book was ever going to congeal into a main storyline.

There are entities who seem analogous to fairies, ghosts, mermaids, and gnomes. Others are wholly original creations, including the main antagonist, The Man With No Shadow. He’s gifted with the ability to control humans’ minds. He can also destroy peoples’ shadows (this makes more sense in the book than you might think).

The Man With No Shadow wants Kate gone and has devised a plan to force her to give up control of the camp. Kate fiercely resists, determined to remain in her role. These two hate each other and would gladly end each other’s lives if given the opportunity, but their relationship has some depth to it. There’s a grudging mutual respect, and even a bit of rapport, between them.

Kate develops an uneasy alliance with another ominous specter, The Man With the Skull Cup, a bloodthirsty and mysterious entity who becomes one of the novel’s most intriguing characters. Just don’t turn him down if he offers you a drink. Refusing will make him mad, and you won’t like him when he’s angry.

The Man With No Shadow leaves plenty of unanswered questions that hopefully will be answered in future installments. How did so many supernatural creatures all congregate in one campground? And how is Kate able to keep these “inhumans” from escaping? Surely a conventional border structure, like a fence, would pose little trouble for monsters as powerful as these. Is she using magic to trap them inside?

Also, I don’t believe Kate’s last name is ever given. Perhaps it’s not important, but I found it strange that this information was withheld. It will be interesting to see how the story’s universe expands.