The writing draws you in immediatiely. Not because of some gory or terrifying hook, but you can just tell that the narrator is is going to tell a good story. Like "draw up a chair, get comfortable, I'm going to tell you how it all went down". Yes, there's obviously something foreboding going to happen, but the way the narrator tells the story is just so intriguing. The descriptions are revealing without being verbose, so you get a sense of all the characters really quickly and the mood of the conversations/scenes, but there's still always something left unsaid which adds to the suspense.

The narrator in present day is approached about re-making a failed horror movie he was in decades prior. He addresses the reader sometimes as if he's recording an audiobook. This is interspersed with his recollections of his interactions with the cast/crew at the time as well as sections of the movie script.

It's a slow burn, but the author knows that. Right when I'm thinking "man, no spooky stuff has happened in a while", he talks about how the horror movie industry has a formula for how often jump scares need to happen and how their movie took the opposite approach. Ok, I feel seen but in a creepy way. I'll try to be patient.

Minor spoilers ahead:

So it all builds up to the one moment you've been waiting for, but it's honestly a little anticlimactic because too many details were revealed before the big scene. End of story? Nope. There's a twist. One that was niggling at me throughout but then what I suspected initially finally comes alive on the page. Not only does it live up to the horror genre, but it also made me re-think everything I'd been told already.

Bigger spoilers ahead:

Is it about school shootings? The monster is also the victim in this story. A kid who is brutalized by his classmates until he becomes unstoppable. But no, because he's also complicit and in the end, one of his classmates does still have some control over him -- or again, he's a willing participant. Does he want the transformation, despite the cost, because he wants to know what it feels like to be powerful, to have the upper hand? Is it just to appease his classmates so he can have a semblance of friends? And of course, the narrator and the character are one -- so what's his motivation? But why do his classmates do this to him? They don't particularly seem to enjoy it all the time. It seems they do have suicidal tendencies (one more clearly than the other), so maybe they are doing this desiring the inevitable end.

The narrator also makes a nod to the lack of clarity. Said sometimes it's scarier when the motivations and/or mysterious forces at work are not so clear cut.

Some scenes/quotes I particularly enjoyed:

The extremely long wait for the monster to make his inevitable kill in the movie and the descriptioin in the script on how the audience may react at minute 1, minute 2, minute 3, etc.

Description of someone as being nice: "in the way someone is friendly to you and smiles and manages eye contract for the full two-minute breezy chat about nothing, and then you declare them as being nice, as though you really know who they are."