Story Time

I’ll admit, I went into *Story Time* expecting a *Final Destination* meets AP classes kind of thrill ride. What I got was way more interesting—and way more disturbing. Bloor’s Whittaker Magnet isn’t just haunted; it’s a petri dish for how institutionalized excellence warps kids, and Dretzin’s narration sells that horror with unsettling precision. There’s a scene early on where a teacher delivers a motivational speech, and Dretzin’s voice drips with such saccharine menace that I actually paused to check if my headphones were glitching. That’s the kind of performance this is: technically flawless, but *wrong* in all the right ways. The pacing, though, is where opinions might split. The first third moves like a satire—sharp, observational, darkly funny—as George and Kate navigate Whittaker’s absurd hierarchies. But once the supernatural bleeds in, the tone shifts abruptly, and some listeners might wish for more breadcrumbs connecting the school’s real-world horrors to its ghostly ones. (The rules of the haunting feel deliberately vague, which works thematically but can frustrate if you’re craving payoff.) And while Dretzin nails the teen voices, her adult characters occasionally tip into caricature—especially the villainous faculty, whose performances are *so* over-enunciated they border on camp. Still, that might be the point: Whittaker’s adults *are* grotesque, and the audiobook leans into it. By the finale, when the line between academic pressure and supernatural possession blurs entirely, you’ll either be gripping your steering wheel or laughing nervously at how close it hits to home. Either way, you won’t forget it.