Cale Dietrich, through his writing, seems like he’s the nicest guy in the world, and so I like it whenever I see he has a new book he’s been able to get onto shelves. His debut novel The Love Interest was a wonderful surprise, a romantic thrill ride with a satisfying ending and a feeling of love that made me genuinely gushy. His next book, The Friend Scheme, was sadly a work too derivative of his previous, and was also too straightforward and sometimes unrealistic for the environment it was trying to portray. This book has him taking on a new kind of story in a new genre, and this time he seems to have returned to the fast pace and buzz that made me read his first novel twice.
The Pledge is about as close to those B-level mid-20th century horror movies you could get, if those movies were progressive enough to have LGBTQ+ themes. Teen Sam Carville a few years ago was attacked while on a trip with his friends and boyfriend for someone baying for blood, and Sam survived within an inch of his life and was able to take his attacker down and kill him. Fortunately, there are no ramblings about the guilt of taking a life, but Sam has sadly still been traumatized about looking into the eyes of death. His boyfriend Eli ends up leaving him, and he has spent quite some time in lonely solitude.
His mom wrote a fiction book based off of the attack and it became a megasmash hit, but Sam was so hurt by how she profited off what he went through that he doesn’t talk to her anymore. His father came out as gay and is now dating a very sweet guy named Peter who Sam just can’t quite open up to. Now he is off to college to try and maybe rebuild his life, and he makes his way into a nice little fraternity, and one or two of the guys have some gay indications. But it won’t be long before a slasher makes his way into the frat, and no one there is safe.
The biggest flaw I have with the book is a few too many people in this book get killed, but there’s also a bit of a silver lining. Like a fair few campy horror movies, the book cuts to different supporting characters who get a chance in the spotlight with the slasher. And some of them do survive. Resorting to killing every character who the slasher confronts would be lazy, unimaginative, and take the tension away.
The mystery as to who the slasher is and their purpose is above average even without being the central focus. Sam is an extremely relatable character and like Dietrich’s other protagonists, he’s a charming hopeless romantic you always root for, and you’re happy for him when it seems he’ll get the guy. There’s a hint in the middle of this book as to who the mastermind is, and then it cleverly shatters it a fair bit of time later. The book is also written for empathy for the different young men in the fraternity, including the at-first least sympathetic grouch Mikey.
This is also Dietrich’s shortest book yet at less than 300 short pages. I felt like he could’ve easily added a few more talking about his classes and what he was thinking of majoring in. But what Dietrich was going for was a straightforward Halloween-esque ride, and I enjoyed it. It’s basically a book of fast-paced fun.
My rating: 4/5
William J. McGinn 
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