"Is She for Real?" (Creepover #7) by P. J. Night

This book... could have been good. Its plot had promise. If it had been just the first half of a larger, more serious book, it would have worked.

Basically, a teenager finds a really old ring on the beach with his metal detector. He gives the ring to his crush, who wears it. Then something starts possessing her (no, it's not Sauron) and slowly twisting her to be more and more like a ghost from the town's legends, who was supposedly buried alive. Then three of the random girls from the town decide to bring her into a tradition where they partially bury each other in sand on the last day of school, she starts freaking out and getting possessed faster, and the other three girls go get help. When they return, she's gone. And then...

This is the part where I say "her crush and the three random girls go find her, figure out it's the ring that's making her be all spooky, get rid of it, and she slowly returns to normal". Exceeeeeeeeept... these books have a habit of throwing away things such as "plot" and "narrative tension" and "any semblance of a satisfying ending" for cheap scrippiness. So what actually happens is "they never find her, her family is all sad, her friends are all sad, her crush is all sad and keeps the ring as a memento before yeeting it in the ocean". 

And that is not how you end a story! That is not how you pace a story! By all rights the buried-in-sand thing ought to have been the turning point of the story, where it switched from "spooky possession story" to "spooky ghost-hunting story". Or the climax of the story, when the characters figure out how to un-possess her. But insteeeaaad, we get a "never found the body" thing. It's like they had a good plot going, and then they took an axe to the end of it and pasted an "oOo SpOoKy" sign on the ragged edge.

Seriously, Mr. Random Ghostwriter (see what I did there?), you could have done better. This could have been good. It could have had a good ending. It could have had a bittersweet ending. It could, in fact, have had any remotely satisfying or ending-ful ending, rather than a tacked-on "hey look at this, yep it's an ending, it's totally great and really spooky, the end."

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+ for its pitiful attempts to be scary. Maybe if I was like nine, it would be actually scary to me.

2 stars. It could have been good! I've half a mind to rewrite this as something actually good. (The other half of my brain insists that no, that would be really hard and I don't want to.)

(Endnote: With 99.99% certainty, P. J. Night is a fake name similar to Winter Morgan; it's rather too on-the-nose for me to take it seriously. With 84% certainty, the 'initial initial surname' format is meant to evoke R. L. Stine.)