Bright Young Things wanted for Big Project.' They're in the prime of their lives but our bright young things are all burnt out. Six sparky twenty-somethings just out of university and working dead-end jobs, they are all bored to tears with their lives and looking for a way out. When a mysterious job is advertised in the newspaper, they all apply. What they least expect is to find themselves prisoners on a deserted island. There's food in the fridge and they have a bedroom each, but there's no telephone, no television, and no way to escape.
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[The room contains a desk, a woman and two large stacks of paper]***
(Canongate Books, 14 May 2014 (first published 2001, borrowed from my library)
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I thought Bright Young Things was going to be intense, something dark and unsettling like the first Saw movie or similar movies where a group of strangers are kidnapped, wake up together somewhere dark and disturbing and crazy stuff happens.
This is not what I got at all.
Bright Young Things is rather a limp noodle.
I loved the set-up with the characters waking up in an island with no clue why they're there and what they're expected to do.
The trouble is nothing happens. I mean it. There's plenty of food so they take turns making meals. They're cigarettes from people who smoke and alcohol for anyone who wants to get wasted and they each have their own bedrooms.
Doesn't that sound terrifying? Actually, no, not at all, the opposite in fact. There's no menace or threat even when something morbid is found in the attic a couple of hundred pages in. They just cook, sit around and chat about their favourite TV shows and videogames and music and stuff.
Bright Young Things is incredibly dull, just several hundred pages with six twenty-somethings on an island, eating and having a chat.
