Michael Hicks's Reviews > Influencer

One of the more welcome and unintended side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and an extended nationwide quarantine that saw many schools switch to virtual instruction was the halting of mass school shootings. Of course, we're no longer in quarantine, and the start of the 2024-2025 school year was marred by that most American of all pastimes as a 14-year-old shot and killed two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School in Georgia on Sept. 4. According to CBS News, this was the 218th gun incident at a school in 2024.

To say that Influencer is a timely read feels a bit on the nose. I began reading Adam Cesare's latest in the shadow of this most recent tragedy because, let's face it, school shootings have become an inescapable facet of American life that we simply refuse to do anything about or care a whit about at all, as evidenced by our continual reelections of politicians who proudly wear AR-15 buttons on their lapels and shrug off scores upon scores of dead kids with a "whaddaya gonna do" indifference. Sure, I could have held off on starting Influencer for another time but, odds are, there'd just be another cycle of mass violence and thoughts and prayers, so may as well dive on in.

Take two parts disturbed teen and school violence, add in social media obsession, teenage angst, and perpetually techno-savvy kids keeping at least ten steps ahead of their parents, it feels unlikely that Influencer will feel dated anytime soon. In some ways, it's a modern riff on Stephen King's yanked Rage, by way of a Zuckerbergian American Psycho for the YA crowd. Aaron Fortin (pronounced with Frenchie flair as "fourteen," which also makes our central antagonist sound like a walking, talking username handle) is a minor Instagram celebrity, broadcasting anonymously as the masked The Speaker. He's built up a steady cult following, with Cesare spectacularly highlighting the cult aspect, à la a young, upstart Charles Manson.

Aaron's parents have yanked him across the country to a Long Island suburb, giving him a chance to reinvent himself as the new kid on the block and expand his profile. At least until Crystal blows his cover and quickly identifies him as The Speaker in front of her friends. It's something Aaron hadn't planned on, and he is nothing if not a meticulous planner. He's unsettlingly intelligent and charismatic, and he stalks through these pages like a spider tracking its prey across dangerous webs he's woven. Crystal immediately becomes his sworn enemy, even if she doesn't realize it right away, and Aaron sets about enmeshing himself with her friends on the road to completely destroying her, mentally and physically.

Cesare delicately and deliberately engages the two in an escalating game of cat-and-mouse. Crystal is driven out of the group, her friends banishing her in favor of the new, attractive, and mysterious Aaron. Aaron subtly and effectively manipulates all of them, engaging in their desires and influencing their decisions, shaping them into the killers he wants them to become. It's not his first rodeo of course. Cesare lays out the stakes immediately in a wildly fraught opening sequence revolving around a home invasion that has been staged by Aaron and ends in a confusing symphony of violence, murder, and arson. What Aaron has planned for Crystal and her ex-friends will make all that look like small potatoes.

High school and horror are simpatico bedfellows, and the horror genre is rife with what Roger Ebert derisively called "Dead Teenager Films." Influencer doesn't feel derivative of works like Scream or Prom Night, but it certainly wears those cinematic influences on its sleeve, along with plenty of true crime inspo, while also engaging in the hot button topic of deranged kids who kill. It's a taut, and often uncomfortable, work of psychological suspense, cult horror, and with a few moments of slashery goodness for some extra oomph, but one that exists within a uniquely American political flashpoint we perpetually choose not to extinguish.