All Your Twisted Secrets, by Diana Urban, has an intriguing premise. Amber, our main character and narrator, is attending a dinner with the mayor and several of her other classmates, all of whom have supposedly won a college scholarship. All of the classmates have a close connection to Amber, as in they are her boyfriend, her estranged best friend, her current bitchy best friend, her secret crush, and a stoner who always seems to be around. The mayor never shows up, and suddenly the door slams shut and they’re all locked in the basement’s restaurant. The kids find a syringe and a note that says if one of them doesn’t take the syringe full of poison and die in the next hour, the all six of them will die because a bomb will go off.
This book has been compared to The Breakfast Club, which I’ve seen, and to Saw, which I have not seen. It reminded me more of the type of morality scenarios that are often discussed in philosophy or social science classes, like the famous “Trolley Problem.” A trolley is racing down the tracks and can’t be stopped. It will for sure kill five people unless you flip a switch and change course, but in that case, one person will be killed. It seems easy at first. Of course you’d kill the one as opposed to the five. But when you think about it becomes more complicated, because by flipping the switch, you are intentionally killing one person as opposed to unintentionally killing five. So, a major issue the characters grapple with in All Your Twisted Secrets is how do they decide to intentionally kill one of them, and whom should it be? Or, rather than committing murder, should they allow themselves all to die from the bomb explosion?
Of course, this situation creates a ton of conflict. The story alternates between the six main characters being stuck in the restaurant’s basement, and flashbacks, where we learn about the messed up lives they all have, and we start to understand how all the conflict came to be. I’d be lying if I said the book wasn’t at times riveting, and I kept reading even when I’d guessed what was going on. But ultimately I was disappointed. The dialogue was fairly stiff (I started counting all the times a characters said “ugh.” It was a lot!) The characters were mostly two-dimensional, and there too many coincidences for me to find the story believable.
In one of my grad classes for my MFA in Creative Writing, I read that a story’s end should seem both surprising and inevitable. The end of All Your Twisted Secrets was neither. I predicted it, all while thinking to myself, “Come on. That could never happen.”
I did enjoy reading All Your Twisted Secrets, because the setup at the beginning was well done, and Diana Urban is skilled at building suspense. That said, I can’t whole-heartedly recommend it, not when there are so many other novels with great premises and suspense that also manage to nail dialogue, characterization and satisfying endings as well.
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