The Summer Fun Massacre

• Author: Craig DiLouie
• Genre: Horror
• Publication Date: June 16, 2026
• Publisher: Run For It
• Series: Slasher Season #1

Thank you to Orbit and Run For It for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

SURVIVING THE MASSACRE IS JUST THE BEGINNING IN THIS RAZOR-SHARP TAKE ON THE SUMMER-CAMP SLASHER, FROM HORROR MASTER CRAIG DILOUIE.

SUMMER 1983: A blood-soaked summer-camp counselor is found staggering down a country road. The sole survivor of a horrific massacre, Mary tells a nightmare of a masked maniac wielding an old skinning knife. Arriving too late to help, her boyfriend Tom Bailey is plagued by guilt.

SUMMER 1992: The camp reopens as Summer Fun. Now a sheriff’s deputy, Tom doubts this is a good idea, but the camp has been refurbished, the counselors hired, and the little campers are on the way. Responding to reports of a blood-curdling howl near the camp, he again arrives too late to save anyone except a single brutalized teen. The killer nowhere to be found.

Hoping to catch the killer and finally right his mistakes, Tom reconnects with Mary. She’s convinced that the killer is not human but instead a rural legend known as the Hungry Hare.

The sheriff wants the case closed but refuses to believe in folklore. Mary dreams of revenge for her friends. And Tom hunts for any trace of the killer: real or fictional. But the murderer could be closer to home than anyone expects.

The Hare is coming and is so, so hungry… 

I’m not usually a fan of horror novels and slasher movies, but something about this one really appealed to me. I didn’t find it overly scary, more spooky and eerie. But it captivated my attention and I couldn’t stop reading. I was lucky enough to receive this in a print version as well as an audiobook, and my read involved both. 

To start with, the story takes place in small-town Texas where there was a summer camp that had a grisly massacre occur in 1983. The story is told through the eyes of Tom Bailey in two timelines. There are flashbacks to his earlier years, when his girlfriend  Mary was the only survivor of the 1983 massacre. He is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt which leads to him becoming a sheriff’s deputy. He’s a good guy, and I really liked him as a character. He’s a guy who feels a deep drive to help others, and he channels his guilt into protecting the public. 

The summer camp reopens nine years later, and Tom finds himself wondering if this is really a good idea. It’s too late to do anything about it though, since the camp is staffed and campers are arriving soon. So when he gets a distress call from the camp, he goes and checks things out. Everything seems fine, but he has a gut feeling and goes back a few hours later to double check. This is when he finds one teenaged girl in a cabin with a weapon, looking crazed. He stays through the night with her as the thing outside continues to threaten them and pelt the cabin with items they can’t see, and they are only able to get away once day breaks.

Since the two massacres were especially grisly, this is clearly not a book for those with a sensitive stomach. Also, there aren’t any leads. It’s hard to figure out who could be behind this because it’s so excessively gory and they live in a small town where everyone knows everyone else and their business. There’s also a creature from folklore that is said to haunt the woods—the Hungry Hare—and is said to be responsible for the carnage. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone to sleep away camp, but I did in upstate NY and heard plenty of scary stories about Cropsey, so I guess it is a common phenomenon to have a folkloric figure to scare the campers. 

However, there aren’t any leads. It’s impossible to think of people who could do something like this in such a small town, and Tom is determined to get to the bottom of this. However, his digging puts him in direct opposition to the sheriff and what he’s ordered to do. This was a really great story, and was done very well. Things moved fast enough to hold my attention, while there was some complex plot developments that I found so intriguing. As Tom investigates, he finds secrets within the town that have been held for a long time. And his searching keeps circling back to the Hungry Hare legend.

The audiobook was narrated by Garrett Michael Brown and Elizabeth Cappuccino, with Brown doing the majority of the reading and Cappuccino appearing periodically as Laura, the sole survivor of the 1992 massacre. Both of them do a fantastic job of sounding like their characters did in my head while reading the print copy, so it was a seamless transition between the audiobook and the print book.

Both Tom and Laura see someone wearing a mask of a hare, and Tom is determined to get to the bottom of it. Since I’m not a big reader of horror, I found this to be fresh and appealing, much like Dead Water by C.A. Fletcher. Both of these books incorporate elements from the past and some things that can’t quite be understood looking through the filter of logic. As Tom continues to dig for answers, he comes up against some people who don’t exactly want him to get to the bottom of the situation. 

I would really have liked to see more growth from the characters. They felt a bit flat, since we don’t really get to know them too much. Even Tom doesn’t show much change throughout the book, although he is forced to confront his own bias when it comes to suspects. Over the course of the story, his relationship to his ex-girlfriend Mary, who was the sole survivor of the 1983 massacre, changes. They start out with simply crossing paths here and there, but Mary finds herself full of rage for her murdered friends and a grudge against the sheriff who instructed dispatchers to ignore any further calls from the camp as teenage mischief, allowing the murderer to creatively massacre the teens and stage the remains dramatically. 

Overall, this was a great story, and I’m definitely going to be looking into more books by the author. I was impressed with the balance between spooky and eerie without fully crossing into being terrified. At night, I tried not to read this one to avoid bad dreams and found myself savoring the story as it unfolds. Since the plot is complex and fast-moving, at times I had to switch to the print book to follow. However, I also really enjoyed the audiobook narration and thought the narrators did a great job. I’m really looking forward to the next book in this series, and how everything turns out because it definitely left the ending open to future books.

Bottom line: Creepy and grisly, but not terrifying, this horror novel leans heavily on local folklore and small-town politics and is a fast-moving story that I thoroughly enjoyed.

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