Keegan and his friends are determined to become the next big thing in live streaming. But chasing views can lead you somewhere you should never go. When they discover that their favorite urban exploring team—the LAF Crew—is planning a livestream inside the abandoned military compound known as Fort Dradd, they can’t believe their luck. Locals call it Fort Dread for a reason. No one knows what really happened there. Whether the stories were fact or fiction.
They tune in to watch the stream. At first, it’s just empty halls and peeling paint, but then they watched on in horror as something came after the LAF Crew. Now Keegan and his friends have a forget what they saw…or go to Fort Dread themselves and uncover the truth. But some legends don’t want to be exposed. And some places were meant to stay abandoned.
For the most part, this one comes off as yet another great effort in the series. The fun central storyline, involving the group of kids watching along to a content creator and his team livestreaming their way through the abandoned military compound in their town as a way to support their hometown, but learn that some of the stories told about it are true, and forcing them to have to go to the facility and see what's going on, sets everything in motion rather nicely. The group is fun and likeable, and the throughline of watching the exploration of the facility through the livestream before having to go themselves makes for a chilling storyline that can still play well with the kid-friendly starting point of what's going on in the building. As well, the two-part storyline where the first half is the group watching along to the group's livestream exploring the facility and then going there themselves, separates this incredibly well and provides the book with a solid change-of-pace.
What makes all of this even more enjoyable is the style of writing here that tends to explore several different styles throughout here. The first half, focusing on the group watching the livestream of the bunker exploration, where the livestreaming group goes through the area looking at the condition it's been left in and encountering the creature still roaming around, leaves this with a strong found-footage vibe as the events of the group's stream are told in a great, immersive manner. The second half, where the group explores the bunker to figure out what happens, manages to generate some highly effective moments of the group exploring the bunker and being caught up in the atmosphere of the situation before turning to more frenetic ideas about their battle against the creature inside. Some of the scenes do have a bit of recognizable restraint by keeping the target audience in mind, so it never strays further than what it could've, but beyond that, there's little here to dislike.
5/5
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