 Oh, didn't see you there. Hello and welcome back to Disturbing Book Reviews, and it's a big welcome since it's been like almost a year since I last posted a Disturbing Book Review. Your patience has paid off though because I have decided to actually listen to my commenters. The two biggest requests, nay, demand that I got from the comments. One, people want me to go into more detail, like get more into the plot, get more into like the gory bits, and two, give spoilers. A lot of people express that they're not interested in actually reading these books for obvious understandable reasons, but they are interested in hearing about it. You like the secondhand horror, I get it. Your wish is my command. Instead of reviewing two books, I'm going to only be reviewing one, and I'm going to be getting into the nitty-gritty. The book in question that we will be talking about is The Playground by Aaron Beauregard. This book recently went somewhat viral on like the book side of TikTok for one particular chapter, which we will talk about, don't worry. This is your one and only spoiler warning. I am going to be going through pretty much all the events of this book in great detail. If you don't want that, don't watch this video. Hello, I'm Julia from The Future. You'll be seeing me periodically throughout the video because I didn't get all the footage I needed the first time. Before we get into this, I want to give like a little mini dapper history. If you aren't familiar with the Splatterpunk genre, neither was I until recently. The genre of Splatterpunk actually originated as a protest or counter movement to increasingly strict censorship laws. So Splatterpunk writers began writing material that was as offensive and violent and gory and sexual as possible. Now even though times have changed and censorship laws are way more lax than they used to be, the Splatterpunk community continues to survive and thrive in the modern era. All marks of the Splatterpunk genre include violence and gore and torture and long descriptions of violence and gore and torture. Now you might be asking, Jules, isn't it a little silly then to be reviewing a book that you know for a fact was not written with the intention of being enjoyable or easy to read? Short answer, yes, it is a little silly. I'm a silly little goose who reads silly little books and you are about to hear about it. This is important. All right? I am going to give a trigger warning for the content of this book only one time. So this is the time. This is your one chance to make an educated decision on the topics that you are and are not okay with hearing about. This is the trigger warning for the content of this story. Drink it in. Take your time. Read all of it. I am going to be talking about everything on this screen at least once. If you do not want to hear about any of that, now is the time to leave. Don't be mad at me. Now that all of that is out of the way, we are finally ready to actually get into a really deep review, a really deep review of the playground by Aaron Beauregard. Luckily for me, the process of summarizing this story works pretty well as a vehicle for giving my opinion on what I like and what I don't like about the book and the writing. So the general plot of the playground, there is this billionaire philanthropist named Geraldine Borden, and she has this plan to build playgrounds in low income areas. Create more green spaces, create more third spaces. It's just good for the community to have a place where kids get to play. It's all great. But these playgrounds will not just be regular playground equipment. No, no, no. She has engineered a bunch of brand new, never before seen equipment for playgrounds. So she has to test this equipment and see how kids actually enjoy playing on it. So she invites three low income families that have kids to her headquarters for the kids to play test the equipment, give little reviews, give feedback. And for their time and for their trouble, each of these families will be receiving $3,000. Sike, bitch, that's not what the story's about. See, Geraldine is a billionaire, but she is no philanthropist. She is this elderly sadist who inherited her family's fortune. At some point, she decided she wanted to actually have kids of her own. She wants to, one, get an heir, you know, to carry on her legacy and two, basically groom this child into being the next big psychopath like her. However, she learned all too late that she was actually not capable of having children of her own, even through like surrogacy or whatever. So to cope, like many other women who struggle with infertility, she decided to invent a fake charity to lure low income families to her enormous murder castle and force the children to go through a series of playground equipment themed saw traps that will torture and kill them one by one while their parents are forced to watch. Okay, don't act like you've never been there. We all cope in our own ways. She also has two assistants or like henchmen. One is her adopted son, Rock, presumably his first name is Duanda and his last name is Johnson. After finding out that she couldn't carry her own children, she tried adoption, adopted Rock and then decided that he sucked and she didn't want him as a son. So Rock is just this enormous, hulking, massive, beaten dog of a man. He has been abused by Geraldine for his entire life, emotionally, physically, sexually. And so even though it's obvious that he could easily overpower Geraldine and escape, he is not like capable of doing that. Her other assistant is this scientist that helped her to invent and engineer all of these playground torture traps. The scientist's name is...Fucks. F-U-C-H-S. And he's German. Fucks, Fuches? Fuch? I don't know. When I was reading it in my head, every time I just pronounced his name, Fucks. Unlike Rock, who doesn't enjoy hurting people and is forced to do the dirty work of Geraldine, Fucks is completely on board with it. He has no qualms about what's going on. He's like, yeah, fuck it, let's kill children. I don't care. We also... We learned that Fucks is a former Nazi scientist who worked in concentration camps experimenting on the prisoners. And this information is brought up and moved on from any other book or piece of media where it's revealed that a character used to be a Nazi. The whole story just screeches to a halt to like unpack what that means. This book does not give a fuck. They're like, yeah, he's Joseph Mengele moving on. There are a lot of characters in this book. There are nine kids, four parents, five actually, and my god, do they ever get picked off one by one? So let's just do a real quick victim speedrun. Coming from the Matthews family, we have Greg, the dad. He is a total asshole. He's one of those really intense, competitive parents. He puts a lot of pressure on his kids. He says shit like I could have gotten pro and football if it weren't for this damn Nea mine. He's basically just a big abusive jerk. Lacey, the mother, she's fine. She's like vain, I guess. She is the first death in the book. I don't really have much to work with for her. Bobby, the oldest son, he's kind of the black sheep of the family. He is a skater boy. I can't see him later, boy. He takes the most of their dad's abuse because he, you know, is not a star athlete. CJ, he's the golden child of the family. He's an athlete and he's also like nice or something. I don't know. Tanya, she is smart and capable and resourceful. She's one of the kids with the best head on their shoulders. And Kip, he's just there. He's like eight. I don't know, he's just hanging out. Moving on to the Grimly family. We got the father, Tom. He's just some guy. He's like normal. The mother, Molly. She's also normal. She's, I don't know. She's just like nice and cares about her kids. Isaac, he's the smart one. He like wears glasses and he's a nerd. So, yeah, loser. There's Sam. She's the middle child, I think of the Grimly's. And in proper middle child fashion, she is the first child to die. And so I don't have much to go off of with her, sorry. And Sadie, the youngest one, I think she's like seven. Isaac, her brother describes her at one point as being like sadistic or like a little psychopath, even though we never really see her acting like a little psychopath. She seems like a normal seven-year-old to me, whatever. And finally, the Clarks, our only single-parent household. We have the mother, Caroline, who is just cartoonishly abusive to her son. She keeps her son on a leash and she like pulls at it to hurt him. And also she like smokes and puts cigarettes out on him. I wonder if she's a bad guy. And finally, Donnie, the youngest of all the children. He is six or seven. He is mute or like he just doesn't really talk in the books. He is also very stoic and doesn't really react to any of the violence he's seeing. He's kind of a wild card. Also, Rock, Geraldine's adopted son, takes great interest in Donnie. He really sees himself in Donnie as someone who is also abused by his mother. But enough about these characters. Let's get into what happens to them. Also, the kids aren't just released straight into the torture chamber. At first they are released onto a decoy playground, which looks completely normal. And then wild dogs are released onto the playground, forcing the kids to go down this big slide that leads straight into the basement. And that's where the torture chamber really is. Oh, also, if you've ever had the irrational fear that someone like put razors in a slide and when you went down and it was gonna cut you, that is exactly what happens when the kids go down the big torture chamber slide. There are razors laced throughout the slide that they like can't dodge. And so before they even start the torture chamber, they're all already cut up to shit. Pretty much every person who talks about the playground is going to mention Saw, the Saw movie franchise. And that's for a good reason because the things that the kids are put through follows almost an identical formula to the traps into Saw movies. It's pretty much a series of rooms that the kids have to try to get through. Each room has some playground equipment-themed death trap that the kids have to complete a challenge around or out smart or brute force their way through and they will almost certainly all be injured or hurt or killed in the process. But they have to go through this to escape and get to the next room where there is another death trap waiting for them. Now, if you're listening to me describing this whole process and you're thinking to yourself, this all sounds a little bit too easy. Don't worry, there's more. Again, similar to the traps in the Saw movies, each of these traps has a time limit to them. They can't take all day, trying to figure out a way to get through these traps without getting hurt. There is a time limit and it is a strict time limit. What is the time limit? I don't know. Unlike the Saw traps, there is no indication given to these kids or to the readers how much time they have to solve each trap. And if they take too long, the room itself collapses. The ceiling just caves in. And the only warning or indication that these kids are given that they are running out of time is the sound of the infrastructure cracking, telling them that the room itself is about to crumble on top of them. Okay, that's a lot. Oh wait, there's more. While all of this is going down, the parents are brought to this movie theater-like room and they're told, from here you'll be able to safely monitor your kids as they play, you know? Just look at this viewing screen. But once they sit down, this mechanism goes off that goes around their neck, trapping them in their seats and forcing them to look at the viewing screen. So they are forced to watch what their kids are going through. Once the parents are strapped in, that's when the facade drops and Geraldine is like, I lied, there is no charity. Also, I'm about to kill your kids. Oh, but wait, there's still more. Geraldine tells the parents that they are also participants in this game of hers. You see, each of the parents has one chance to press a button that will allow them to speak over an intercom to the kids. They can use this opportunity to help. They can give hints, maybe if the parents can see something that the kids don't see to warn them or they can use it to just say goodbye. Okay, now that we have muscled our way through that dense exposition, let's get into my review and the things that I liked and that I didn't like. So as you might have noticed, that took me like 15 minutes just to explain all the rules and the settings for this torture chamber. And even though it's complicated, I think I actually like that the book does this. I like that there's no stones left unturned. It feels like it's something that was invented by an insane person who has had decades to plan it out, just like Geraldine Borden did. I went into this book knowing what it was, you know? I knew it's a Splatterpunk book involving children. I was like, okay, this is going to be a very sad, miserable book to read. I was braced for that. I was prepared. What I was not prepared for was how absurdly funny this book is at times. Real quick, my lawyer has recommended that I specify I don't find child murder funny, okay? In fact, I'm against it. However, the violence and the evil and the mean-spiritedness in this book is so over the top and so extreme that it becomes absurd. And multiple times I laughed out loud, which leads us to the main thing that made me laugh while reading this book was our baddie of the evening, Geraldine Borden. She eats, I fear. She kind of slays. She is the most evil, crazy, over-the-top villain possibly ever written in the history of literature. It's the fact that she is contrasted with the rest of the characters who for the most part are like normal people. And then there's this mustache twirling, hand-rubbing, cape-flapping villain. Probably the best way to make my point is this one illustration in the book because yes, there are illustrations, of course. You see one of the families driving in a normal ass car to the address that they were given. And the address is this enormous, vampiric, looming castle. Cause that's where Geraldine lives. Everything about her, she is such a cartoonishly evil villain to the point that while she's watching like the kids getting killed and the parents viewing their kids getting killed, she's literally like laughing and rubbing her hands. You know, you can go on and on about how like this is a poorly written character or whatever, but honestly, in today's day and age, where it feels like every antagonist needs to be like somehow sympathetic or have a tragic backstory or be like justified in some twisted way, it is a breath of fresh air to have a character who is just evil and rotten to their core and insane. She is just a fun, evil person. She makes so many parts of the book unnecessarily funny. She steals the show in every chapter she's in. I started looking forward to the next time I'd see her because I just knew she was gonna be on some twisted shit. Now I'm gonna move on to other things that I liked about the book, but trust me, we will be hearing about my girl boss queen again very soon. Another thing that I liked about the book is that Aaron Beauregard is surprisingly very good at writing kids, surprisingly. I don't know why I was expecting him to suck at writing kids. Sorry, Aaron, I'm a born hater. I can't help it. These kids range in age from, I think, like seven to 14. So they're all at different stages of development and they all act like it. It would have been really easy for the author to just make all of the kids super good and innocent and sweet, you know, to make it like, oh, so tragic when bad things happen to them, but he didn't. They act like actual kids. Some of them are like annoying or whiny. Some of them are like really aggressive and controlling. One of the characters who I fuck, I need to talk about this guy is Bobby Matthews. So Bobby is from the Matthews family. And if you remember Bobby's dad is that like really intense winner mentality, you know, like hard on his kid's guy. And Bobby as kind of the black sheep of the family gets a lot of his dad's abuse. And so he openly like doesn't like his dad. He doesn't like the way his dad acts. And yet we see that he is becoming a bully just like his dad. Okay, I can't believe I talked about Bobby without mentioning his best line of dialogue and possibly the best line of dialogue in the entire book. So throughout the whole book, he's picking on Isaac, the nerd character because, you know, this conversation happens before any of the horror starts. Bobby says to Isaac, what, not good enough for you? No, it's not that. I just, if it's not good enough for you, why don't you just flap those huge fucked up ears of yours and fly away dumbo? Got him! Bobby is both a victim and a bully. And I really liked that. It would have been super easy to just make all the children like super sweet and innocent and nice, but the author didn't. And I think that was a really good decision. Another thing I like about the writing of the kids is that they're not stupid. I feel like that's really a go-to with lazy writers when they're writing a child character is to just like make them stupid and use them as a vehicle to like fuck things up. When in reality, one, that's not fucking true, kids aren't stupid. And two, it's so much more engaging watching these kids actually strategizing. Like they are giving suggestions and coming up with ideas for how to survive these traps. And it's like, their planning actually pays off. They are able to problem solve their way through quite a few of the traps. It's so much more engaging watching them like put two and two together and make progress. And it makes it so much more tragic when the kids like did everything they could. They actually did everything right and they still failed. Now you might be saying, Julia, you're, you know, going on and on about how this book was absurd and funny. Well, what about the violence to the children? Is that done in an over the top way? That you don't really take it seriously. Is that part funny? No. Like I said, the author did a really good job of writing the children to, you know, act like children. And it's just too realistic, man. The first child to die is Sam of the Matthews family. After the kids are first forced into like the actual like saw trap area, they see like what their first challenge is going to be. And Sam, who remember it's like seven or eight is just crying and inconsolable and saying like, I want my mommy, I want to leave, I want to get out. And so she runs down this hallway hoping that like there will be a way out. She sees at the end of the hallway, there's a glowing exit sign. And so she runs even faster only to discover that there is a fucking bomb at the end of the hallway. Oh my God. Suddenly at the parts where we're describing like the violence and the suffering of the children, that absurdist over the top funniness is gone. And it's just cruel realism. Sam's sister Sadie runs down the hallway to try to save her. And after the bomb goes off, she sees that her sister is like kind of blown to pieces. And there's, I just like, I know it doesn't actually go on that long, but reading it, it felt like it just lasted forever. The section describing that Sadie grabs her sister's arm and is trying to like pull her back up the hallway like to safety, back to the groove. But she's like nine. And so she like with each tug, she can only pull like an inch at a time. It's God. Like I said, I went into this book braced and ready. I knew that I was going to be reading upsetting things involving children. And yet it still caught me off guard. I thought it was prepared, I was not. This same cruelty, this mean-spiritedness continues for all of the children's deaths because yes, they do get picked off one by one. All the traps are designed to be so unfair and so difficult for children of these ages to complete. Uh, like I said, the fact that the children are well written, the fact that they're not stupid and making like dumb decisions makes it even more painful to watch them genuinely trying to figure, find a way out. And they just can't do it because they're children. And oh, I hope you didn't forget that their parents are being forced to watch all of this happen because they are. And every other chapter, we cut back to the parents just to read about them weeping. I just got to pack in as much human suffering as possible. Oh wait, Geraldine, she saves the day. This book gives you whiplash so many times while reading it because like you'll be reading this crushingly realistic scene and then it cuts back to Geraldine, our like mustache twirling villain and she's just on some fuck shit. Probably the best example of this like contrast into dichotomy is right after Sam's death. The kids are terrified. They are realizing what's going on and where they are just how dire their situation is. Sadie is screaming and crying because she just watched her sister perish and now she's even more injured. Everyone is in turmoil. And then the chapter ends and the next chapter begins, I kid you not with Geraldine popping champagne, popping champagne as she watches this scene go down on like one of the monitors and saying like, zoom in, I wanna see everything. That is one of the times when I completely lost my composure and laughed out loud. It's not funny, but it's just so jarring. God, this book. Like I said, I found myself looking forward to the parts with her and them because like shit, at least I won't have to be reading about more suffering. So this, what I've described really is the structure of the entire story. Once the kids are into their series of traps it alternates chapter by chapter between the kids going through these traps and being picked off one by one. The next chapter is the parents watching what we just read, just a whole chapter of them crying and suffering. And then the next chapter is Geraldine and fucks just hanging out and having the time of their lives. You see why now. I found myself looking forward to Geraldine's chapters despite her being such a despicable character. The chapters with her and them are easily the easiest to read. Well, except one. All right, on to some of the parts of the book that I didn't like because despite my waffling on I don't think that this book is perfect. The first problem that I had really is the pacing. Like I said, it alternates between like kids, parents, Geraldine. The parents sections are the least interesting. Every time it cuts to the parents it just kind of goes on and on. They did not need to be that long. These parents are strapped into chairs. They're not doing shit. There is like a kind of interesting plot that grows where the grimly parents the normal loving parents try to convince rock to let them out. Like he doesn't have to be a slave to Geraldine. This doesn't have to end like this, you know? Because they can tell that he's not evil. He doesn't enjoy doing this. That's interesting. That is truly interesting. But the rest of the chapter is just the parents watching on the screen what we just read about. We already know what happened and also like crying and bickering with each other. And God, that goes on so long, gets old so fast, man. Now I mentioned that there is one chapter with Geraldine in particular that is not fun to read. This is the chapter that really blew up on the book side of TikTok that I mentioned at the very beginning. This is really the chapter where we remember that what we're reading is a splatter punk book. Aaron Beauregard does not just want us to be shocked and horrified. He also wants us to be grossed out. That's right, baby. There's poop in this chapter. Everybody brace yourself, okay? We're gonna take a deep breath. I'm gonna describe what happens in this chapter and we're all gonna move on like adults, okay? This doesn't have to be a big like eww poopy thing, even though I did say eww poopy when I read this chapter. It's like a flashback to Geraldine's childhood where she remembers that she was incestuously obsessed with her mother and she would like watch her parents having sex because she wanted to be the one having sex with her mother. Take a deep breath. It gets worse. The big star of this chapter is the scene where Geraldine recalls the time that she went into her mother's bathroom and masturbated thinking about her mother and then discovered that her mother had gone to the bathroom earlier and continued masturbating using the contents. Using the contents of the toilet. Geraldine, my girl. I can't keep defending you. Yes, this part goes on for a long time. It is detailed. You get the smell, sound, feeling, taste of everything that's happening. I do have a problem with this chapter and my problem goes beyond simply saying like eww poopy. You know, I've been on the internet for forever. I've seen disgusting things. My problem is just that it is very obvious that the author, it felt like a checklist thing, like things to include in my book. There has to be violence towards children, check. There has to be a mention of Nazis, check. There has to be genuine, profound human suffering, also check. But then you like realize the book wasn't gross enough. He's like, oh, shit, I forgot the poop chapter. Because this chapter happens and then we move on from it and it connects nothing to the story. Obviously it serves insight on Geraldine. Like, okay, so she is always a twisted fucked up person but like the poop part in particular feels very added in. I never thought I'd be complimenting the book cows on its use of poop. But at least in that story, like the main focus of the book is how disgusting everything is, you know? And so the poop really fits the overall aesthetic, the vibe of it all. Whereas in the playground, the main vibe is more so like violence and sadness. And so this like gross out moment, it just doesn't really fit in. It feels out of place. Like it belongs in a different book. I think I need to expand upon Geraldine's disgusting sexuality because that's like a pretty major part of this book. There are multiple long descriptions of her masturbating evilly throughout the book. Like for example, this poop masturbation flashback happens while she is in her mirror maze of masturbation. It is a hall of mirrors with sex toys taped to the mirrors so that she can masturbate while watching herself masturbate. We also learned that she has been sexually abusing rock, her adopted son for his whole life. And we are treated to a very unpleasant chapter describing her forcing rock to have sex with her. I will say in this book, there are no descriptions of child sexual abuse. However, one moment that got to me like way more than I was ready for. Partway through the book while watching the kids completing these different playground saw traps, Geraldine picks a favorite. She decides that Tanya is her favorite and she starts being like, hmm, maybe if she survives this, she could be my heir. Like I could adopt her and mold her into the baby psychopath I've always wanted to have. And so Geraldine while watching Tanya on the monitors starts touching herself. Yeah, it's pretty quick. And like I said, we never actually see any of the children getting sexually abused, but it's still genuinely stomach turning and very fucking hard to read. Okay, another thing I didn't like in this book and I fully am willing to take accountability. Maybe I'm just too stupid to get it. I didn't have a problem with the traps themselves, but there's one trap that is described so confusingly that I reread this section at least three times trying to like be able to visualize what they were describing. And I still have no fucking clue what this trap looked like. All of the other traps are pretty self-explanatory. And for some of these traps, there's even illustrations just to like make it as clear as possible. But for the hopscotch trap, I was thrown to the wolves dog. I had no idea what I was reading. Okay, let me try to explain the description of this trap. So the kids start this trap on a platform. In front of them, there is a long, narrow path with a hopscotch board drawn on it. Easy enough, right? The hopscotch path ends at another platform that has heaven written on it. Okay, we're trying to get to heaven. Pretty obviously this is telling us the kids are gonna have to hopscotch their way across the path without falling. But also on either side of the stone path, there are enormous meat grinders. Okay, upping the ante a bit. The kids have to hopscotch across and their balance has to be perfect because one slip could mean falling into one of these meat grinders, right? Understandable. Then there's the cows hanging above the meat grinder. Hanging in like cages are for adult cows. Why cows? Why would cows be here? The only purpose that the cows serve seemingly randomly, one of the cages will like open and drop the cow into the meat grinder. And it like, you know, explodes and sprays the kids with blood and the description lasts a whole paragraph. I guess the purpose is just to scare the kids and freak them out even more. The simplicity of the other traps works. It's like challenging and stressful. This one just missed the mark for me. All right, this is the big one. This is the biggest problem I had. The biggest problem I had with the book is probably also like my favorite part of the book. It's Bobby. Remember, Bobby is like this troubled adolescent. He's the black sheep of the family. He took the brunt of his father's abuse and now he has become a bully himself. Like I said, really compelling character. I love to read about him. I love hearing him interacting with the kids and like seeing how he like reflects his upbringing. That was fantastic. He gets ruined in one page. And I don't mean like, oh, he dies in a single page. No, his character gets ruined for me in a single page. So let me set the scene. The kids enter the room for their next trap. They see that the trap is this enormous slide with blades on it, of course. And the only way for the kids to get out is if they go down the slide. Luckily, Isaac, the glasses nerd kid, realizes that the blades are coming up and down in like consistent intervals. And so he's like, guys, if we time it right, we can make it down the slide so that they go down as we are over those parts. And so they try this out and it works. And so the kids form a line and they are all one by one going down the slide. They're all timing it. This is going great. Guys, we did it. The true playground was with friends who met along the way. Then Sadie gets up on top of the slide and she freezes. She just gets so scared that she can't move. She's at the top of the slide and Bobby is behind her. She's paralyzed and she's crying and everyone is screaming to her. Isaac is screaming to her. He's saying like, you can do it. We all made it. I'll tell you when to go. It's possible. You just have to listen to me and she can't move. And she pees her pants and she's just shaking and crying and Bobby is behind her and he's saying, if you don't go, I'm gonna push you. This moment has everything that I loved in the book in it. It has the kids using their heads and being smart and resourceful and that paying off. We see the realism of how the kids are written. We see Sadie acting like an actual seven year old. We see Bobby, this victim turned bully, lashing out at other kids just the way that he's been lashed out at. And of course, on top of all of that, the time limit. They only have probably a minute to get her to go down the slide before this building starts collapsing around them. This moment is so tense. I was on the edge of my seat reading it. All the characters were at their best. I was fully engaged. I love this. This really felt like a climax. And then the Matthew's dad gets on the intercom. While Sadie is frozen at the top of the slide and Bobby is screaming at her saying, go or I'm gonna push you. The Matthew's dad gets on the intercom and tells Bobby, do it, push her. But wait, it can't just be that bad. It has to be worse. Bobby doesn't just push Sadie down the slide. He peep game and lock in because what I'm about to describe actually happens in the book. I am not exaggerating or joking at all. The second that his dad tells him, do it, push the seven year old girl to her death. Bobby like a super soldier locks in and is like, kill. He takes out a knife because they found a knife along the way. I don't know why Bobby got it. And stabs the seven year old girl. He's not just stabbing her. He's like going at it like an animal. But wait, there's more. He doesn't just stab the fuck out of the seven year old girl. He then proceeds to, and I want to remind you, I am not making this up. This is what happens in the story. Push her face first, stomach first down on the slide. Standing on top of her body. Standing on top of her body at the top of the slide. And then I kid you not, the book describes it as he skateboarded her down. He skateboarded standing on her body down to the bottom. He didn't time it, but it didn't matter because the blades just went straight through her as if she hadn't been cut up enough. Again, I can't say this enough. I really liked Bobby up until this point. In one page, he turned into the serial killer of this century. The motivation for Bobby doing this, for Bobby switching on a dime doesn't make sense. Bobby doesn't fucking like his dad. He doesn't like the way that his dad barks at him and commands him around and talks down to him. So why is it that when his dad gives him an order, he's like, yes sir. Hilariously, the skateboarding part really throws me up. When he gets done doing Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 with a child's corpse down a slide and he gets to the bottom, all of his peers are around him horrified and he's just like, who's next? Who else wants some of this? Meanwhile, back in the parents theater of pain, they're watching what just happened and the Grimsley parents are like inconsolable, screaming at what they just saw happen to their little girl. And the Matthew's father gives like a villainous laugh. Fuck off. I'm back again because I explained it really poorly the first time. My problem with this chapter and with this specific moment of character development really boils down to Geraldine, of course. This book only needed one crazy evil character and that character was Geraldine and she filled that role flawlessly. She is the Beyonce of insane evil women. In my opinion, it was really important to the dynamic of all these characters that even the characters who were like bad, like the mean ones were still believable. Like Greg is a total asshole but I have met people like Greg in real life. Same with Bobby. Geraldine is such an extreme unbelievable over-the-top bad guy but it works because there's only one of her and so she gets to steal the spotlight and it's like a funny contrast between her and the mostly normal cast of characters, you know? I guess you could argue that fucks is also an over-the-top bad guy. I mean, he is, but he plays such a minor role. He's really just there to be Geraldine's BFF in like high five, her every time a new kid dies. But then when this chapter happens, it's like, okay, so Geraldine is an insane evil bad guy but Greg is also an insane evil bad guy and apparently Bobby is also an insane evil bad guy. It's like, damn, I guess Geraldine's bloodlust is really not that unique of a trait to her. If like one in 10 people in this universe is okay with butchering children to get what they want, you know? It just becomes too crowded. It's too much. And I already know you bitches are gonna come at me in the comments like, but Julia, it's a splatterpunk book. The goal of the book is to be as graphic and violent as possible. Of course, sometimes characters are going to do ridiculous things as a vehicle for more violence. And to that I respond, shut up. Now, I bet at this point you're wondering, how does the book end? Is it at least a kind of happy ending? What a stupid fucking question. Why? No, it's not a happy ending. It ends as happily as I guess you could hope for in a story this bleak. The parents finally convince Rock that he doesn't need to be a slave to Geraldine and he's like, you know what? Yeah, I'm gonna go kill that bitch and her gay Nazi sidekick. And don't worry, Geraldine does not get off easy. She realizes that Rock is gonna come beat her ass. And so she runs into her masturbation mirror maze to try to confuse him. But she forgot that Rock is the one who built the mirror maze. So she's like somewhere in the maze trying to confuse him and get him lost. He decides to just smash straight through the mirrors one after another to get to her, which is epic. I gotta say that was really satisfying. And so Rock finally gets his revenge by taking Geraldine, like literally picking her up and smashing her through mirror after mirror after mirror. And it just goes on and on for pages. And I gotta admit, it was very satisfying. Once he's had his fill, Rock decides he's gonna officially end her life by dropping her ass first onto like an enormous glass shard and they describe that he grabs her head and he like wants to look at her face one last time before he kills her. And there is literally no face left because she's just been cut up and pulverized that much. Rest in peace, Geraldine. I forgot to mention, Fox also dies, but Geraldine's death is more interesting. Of the nine kids, only two of them survive. They are Tanya and Donnie. Rock, before taking his revenge, he lets the parents out of their constraints. Greg dies, who fucking cares? It's like implied that the grimly parents are going to kind of take in and adopt Tanya and Donnie because all of them have in one day lost all of their family. It's like a found family against their will. After Rock is done with his masturbation mirror maze madness, he is also very cut up and injured. And I think Geraldine also shot him at some point. He like limps bloody out to where the grimly parents and Tanya and Donnie are. And Rock tells them like, go on, get out of here. And they're like, you need to come with us. We're going to the hospital. You're going to bleed out. And Rock basically says like, there is no life for me in this world after what I've been through. And so he's going to die on his own terms. So the parents and the kids escape, they leave. And the final chapter is Rock going on to the decoy playground, where it's like an actual normal playground and spending the last moments of his life playing because he never got the chance to actually play when he was a child. And he slowly bleeds out, but happily and at peace because he knows that the grimly parents actually care about children and that they are going to give Donnie and Tanya an actually good life and then he dies. It's so fucking sad, man. So the big question of the hour, do I recommend this book? Honestly, I can't say no if you've read all the trigger warnings, of course. And if you're looking for like a thrilling, shocking, gross, gory, funny over the top and also sad story, by all means, you should read this book. The playground is truly engaging. There wasn't a single moment when I was bored. I found myself reading through it really fast. I think I finished it in like two days just because I was into it, you know? I was like, I needed to know what happened next. There were absolutely points when I wanted to put the book down and give up reading and those parts were not the gore. It was not the Nazi stuff. It wasn't even the poop masturbation scene. It was the sadness. This book is fucking sad, man. Like while you're reading about these kids going through hell and going through these like insane death traps, at no point are you allowed to forget that they are children and at no point are you allowed to forget that these children have parents who love them. Aside from the human skateboard aspect of it, Sadie's death really is one of the things that got to me in this book. Just the part where she freezes up on the slide and she pees her pants and is drooling and crying. It's just too much. It's too mean. Also, yeah, Rock is just a very sad character. He's a very good character for the story. He's an important, he needs to be there. But fuck, man. Talk about killing a party. Like throughout the book, as he's watching the parents getting upset about what is happening to their children, he's like, wow, I didn't know parents could love their kids. Or like when the kids are released onto the decoy playground and they're just playing normally, it cuts to rock. And he's like, I wish I got to play on a playground when I was a kid. I was too busy getting beaten and molested by Geraldine. It's like, oh my God, man. If you are interested in reading a thrilling and shocking and bleak and depressing book, by all means, you should read the playground. And for those of you who are gonna get on my ass about like, oh, but you didn't describe all the death traps. You didn't describe all the children's deaths, whatever. Read the book yourself. If you really want descriptions of violence that bad, you will be satisfied with this book. I promise you. I will say, despite how sad and upset this book made me, I do want to read more of Aaron Beauregard's works. I think the thing that made this book so hard to read at parts is the fact that Aaron Beauregard is actually like a good writer. He can make you feel things. And besides just like shock and disgust and fear, like he makes you care about the characters. Obviously I've been waffling on about how much I love Bobby this whole time. The fates of all of these characters got to me so much because he made me care about them. Fuck, I had a lot to say about the playground tonight. This video is gonna take me roughly a fucking year to edit because there's just so much to talk about with this book. And I skipped over a lot. So if you choose to read this book, even though I have like spoiled the whole thing, there are so many insane things that I didn't mention in this video that you will still like be in for constant surprises along the way. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. If you made it through this whole video, I don't know how, but congratulations. If you have any other disturbing book recommendations that you'd like to see me review, please feel free to comment them down below. Maybe I'll make a review in another five years. And as always, keep reading, support local authors. And thank you so much for watching. Subscribe if you want to, don't if you don't. And I will see you next whenever I upload. Bye.