I would like to thank Sarah from Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – Titan

Published – Out Now

Price – £8.99 paperback £6.64 Kindle eBook

In a Britain akin to this one, Vincent Rice falls off a ladder, literally at Petra Orff's feet. They introduce themselves, and he offers to take her to Metamuse, an alternative theatre experience like no other that he won tickets to in a competition he doesn't remember entering.

Vincent has a complex sense of home, and immigrant Petra senses a kindred spirit in him. As time goes on, inexplicable occurrences pile on top of one another, connected to Metamuse: certainly more than just a theatre experience. Unquiet dead seem to be reaching into the world to protest injustices both past and present.

Something I really miss has been going to see a play. There is a special feeling watching people on stage create their own reality. In the theatre you’re the unseen observer but increasingly we are seeing a more immersive theatre experience where the audience themselves play a character with companies such as Secret Cinema, Punch Drunk’s various performances or even Doctor Who in recent years. Reality as most readers will tell you is malleable but exactly when do you know what is real and what is not? That’s the question posed in Louis Greenberg’s interesting modern horror story Exposure.

Petra’s life is utterly changed when handsome Vincent falls to her feet. She’d previously been worrying about her mum’s health and trying to live a normal life in the UK after leaving South Africa for many years). Vincent creates a spark for Petra plus he has tickets to Metamuse one of the trendiest immersive theatre companies unusually performing in Leamington Spa for a change. A date at a performance where they both let the experience guide them leads to a further intense love affair but Petra finds the next performance offers a darker experience; she sees people who appear to be dead or injured and the more Petra discovers about Metamuse and also Vincent she fears he is being drawn into a very dangerous situation. One she needs to try and stop.

What I loved about this story is the way this plays with reality within the structure of a book. We see the strangeness of a Metamuse performance and then as the story allegedly leaves the theatre we spot strange scenes that ring bells, characters who may or may not now be out in the wild and start to question has the performance ever stopped? The horror is unnerving that you can be manipulated and shunted through your life to do things that you’d never normally do. There is a rising feeling of unease and dread that really gets very tangible in the story and the secrets of Metamuse are revealed.

What less worked for me was the character and setting of the tale. Petra is a very engaging lead but at a certain point you’re asking why is Vincent so important to her? Instalove is always something I’m not keen seeing in a story so that may be me but there quite a few times when I was reading her actions thinking would anyone do that? He feels an obviously shallower character. The other aspect that didn’t quite work was the near future setting and attempt to discuss the spread of private healthcare. In this case I actually think we needed a little more to flesh the world out and its links to the wider story and for me these plotlines didn’t come together very well. We may have needed to spend more time in Petra’s normal world to know why Metamuse manages to change things so easily. Despite all this watching characters get drawn into a living nightmare forcing them to make bad decisions is still fairly uncomfortable horror that a lot of the time I could look past these points.

I found Exposure an interesting horror ride with real moments of fear and unease, but it never quite sucked me into the world it created and didn’t give me the fully immersive experience its’ characters were experiencing. An enjoyable tale however with a really cool idea still worth exploring.