🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 5/5 | Steam: 🔥 | Standalone
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t listened to The Dinner Party yet — go do that first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Okay so let me tell you about the time I narrowly escaped being served as the main course at a cannibal dinner party, befriended a werewolf, and then got killed by my roommate with a razor-tipped selfie stick. Freida McFadden’s The Dinner Party is a Pick Your Poison Adventure story, which means YOU get to make the choices, YOU get to decide how the story goes, and YOU get to be personally responsible when everything goes horrifically wrong. There are over 20 possible endings and I’m telling you right now: most of them involve dying. This one was so fun I messaged CJ halfway through to tell her she absolutely had to listen to it, and I stand by that completely. Five stars. No notes. Well, okay, one note. I’ll get to it.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
First Things First: Stand Up to Blair
The setup is that you (your character’s name is Sloan) are flat broke, two weeks behind on rent, and your roommate Blair is threatening to kick you out by tomorrow if you don’t have the money. Right off the bat the book gives you a choice: do you stand up to Blair and tell her that’s not fair, or do you assure her you’ll have the money by tomorrow? And I want to be clear that in real life I would absolutely fight someone on this, so that’s what I chose. I stood up to Blair. Blair immediately started throwing my stuff out the window. Her boyfriend helped me find the exit. Then I was standing on the sidewalk collecting my belongings like some kind of cautionary tale, homeless in three chapters. THE END.
So that happened. The great thing about this book is you can restart as many times as you want, so I went right back to chapter one and this time told Blair I’d have the money. Progress.
Accept the Sketchy Job, Obviously
With Blair temporarily pacified, your friend Avery calls and offers you a waitressing gig that pays suspiciously well for a one-night job at an isolated mansion way out on Peyton’s Peak. The book basically tells you “this sounds like it will definitely get you killed” and then asks if you want to take it anyway. And I mean. Yes. For the sake of the adventure, yes, I accepted.
Getting to the mansion involves borrowing Blair’s car, encountering a hungry cat on the way out (I am an animal person, the cat got fed, this was never even a question, but honestly i thought the cat would come into play later, like a witch or something that saves me because i fed it but no such luck on my path), driving past a hitchhiker on the highway (absolutely not, hard no), and then hitting a fork in the road where the directions just… don’t specify left or right. I went right, because that make sense. That was apparently correct. Then I pulled up to these gates that opened very, very slowly while I sat there weighing whether to turn back, decided that turning back was certainly the game-ending option, and drove through.
Something Is Very Wrong With This Dinner Party
At the door is Carson, who is very attractive and also the butler, who immediately leads Sloan inside and then pulls her aside to whisper that she’s in danger. Great start. Avery appears, leads Sloan in to meet the guests, and they’re all members of something called the Adventurous Eaters Club, people who eat unusual and adventurous food. They are thrilled to see Sloan, which is a lot considering she’s just there to wait tables. One guest says “I can’t wait for you to be served to us,” and the host, Mr. Wentworth, covers by saying his friend’s English isn’t great and he means “for you to serve us.” Sure. Sure.
Mr. Wentworth wants to take Sloan’s photo for an ID badge, which seems odd for a one-night shift, and I was getting enough hinky vibes that I had her decline. One of the guests helpfully pointed out that her photos are all over social media anyway, so they let it go. Then Mr. Wentworth takes her to the biggest dining room she’s ever seen and casually shows her a photo wall of every animal the club has ever eaten, because they always get a picture before the meal. Sloan asks what’s on the menu tonight and he tells her it’ll be a surprise.
Most reasonable people would have sprinted for the car at this point. But I had the very strategic thought that if someone is eventually going to be hunting me through this mansion, knowing the layout could come in handy, so I chose the house tour (though this didn’t end up coming into play in my path either). The home theater is a projector aimed at a twin bed with a stained sheet. The library contains exactly one teetering stack of books on the edge of collapse. The “Olympic-size swimming pool room” is a room that could fit an Olympic pool, with a puddle of water in the middle of it. Mr. Wentworth keeps insisting these are very impressive. Then he says “wait until you see the top floor,” and Sloan, I, was done with the tour— so that is the option i chose, but I needed to know what was up there, so I kept listening to the upstairs chapter anyways.
Oh. OH. They’re Going to Eat Her.
In the kitchen there’s a massive oven, a full tour of the appliances, and then someone hands Sloan a metal serving tray. When she angles it just slightly, she can see the chef standing right behind her reflected in the tray holding a knife. The options are: hit him with the tray, or don’t think anything of it. I found that suspicious, so I had her hit him. Mr. Wentworth completely loses it and grabs for a knife of his own, and Sloan bolts through the only exit, which is the dining room, where a brand new photograph is hanging on the wall. It’s a photograph of her. She was the dinner tonight.
Sloan runs into Avery, who is obviously in on it since she’s the one who recruited Sloan for this job and made sure she showed up, and Avery says there’s a secret exit through the back, while finding that exit they walk past the cannibals. The options are to confront the cannibals in the parlor or escape with Avery, and I skipped the confrontation and went with Avery, who led her through a hallway straight to the front door. Sloan tries to go out the front, Avery says no, Mr. Wentworth or his goons will be waiting out there, take the back door. I didn’t trust Avery even slightly, so Sloan went for the front door anyway.
The Great Escape (Sort Of)
Nobody was at the front. Avery followed her out protesting, and then someone came around the corner and hit Avery over the head with a rock. It was Carson. He says he wasn’t trying to hurt Sloan, he was trying to save her, because Avery was leading her directly to Mr. Wentworth (which if you listen to the chapters if you follow Avery to the back door, she totally was!!!). Carson says Avery knew Sloan didn’t have many friends, needed money desperately, and had nobody who would come looking for her. Which is just genuinely dark.
Carson says they have to get out through a section of fence where the bars are loose, because the car gates are controlled and they can’t use those. They’re running for the fence when movement comes out of the bushes and it’s the hitchhiker Sloan passed on the road. He says the people inside already know their plan and are waiting for them at the fence, and that Carson and Sloan will both be killed if they go that way. He found another exit and they should follow him, totally. Carson says he’s lying. The options are follow Carson or follow the hitchhiker, and I stuck with Carson. Carson is cool. They got through the hole in the fence and made it off the estate.
Carson Is a Werewolf. Obviously.
They’re out in the cold working out how to get home when Carson mentions he has a car parked about a mile away, and Sloan starts to think about how he could have had a car ready unless he already knew something was going to happen tonight, and before she can really sit with that question he doubles over groaning and turns into a werewolf. Right. So it turns out Carson got the job at the mansion last week because his sister went missing and he tracked her to the estate, and he figured he’d wait for the adventure eaters to gather before taking them all down at once. He and Sloan have some chemistry, so the options are to mate with the wolf or tell him you just want to be friends. I chose friends. They get to his car (a very nice red Jaguar, for what it’s worth), he drives her home oh and by the way Carson is loaded, she thinks maybe she could have dated a werewolf with a ton of money, but I chose not to sleep with him. He gives her extra money for the night and says he’ll go back to deal with the Adventure Eaters Club and bring her car back in the morning.
And Then Blair Kills Her With a Selfie Stick
Sloan walks into her apartment and Blair is already there, furious, wanting to know where her car is. Sloan says nothing happened, she’ll have it back tomorrow. And then Blair, who had apparently planned ahead, charges at her with a selfie stick that had a razor blade attached to it and kills her. After the cannibal club. After the werewolf butler. After making it all the way home. Blair got her with a selfie stick. I said “what the hell” out loud.
But Also — Everything Else That Can Happen
The thing is, I couldn’t help myself — I listened to more chapters (not all) than just the ones I chose, because I needed to know what else was out there. There’s an ending where Mr. Wentworth kills Sloan and she has the option to come back as a ghost. There’s one where she ends up happily ever after and doesn’t get eaten by anyone. There’s one where she ends up marrying Carson and he eventually eats her. There’s apparently something involving a giraffe going out to the second floor of the mansion, which I have so many questions about. The hitchhiker, if you pick him up at the start, has his own whole thing going on that takes the story in a completely different direction. The number of places this book can take you is wild, and most of them end in someone’s death, and somehow that is exactly what makes it so addictive.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 — No steam here at all. The closest this book gets is the option to “mate with the wolf,” and if you choose that path, it turns out Carson is saving himself for marriage anyway. Zero complaints about the 🔥 rating for this one; the whole point is the mystery and the chaos, and it works exactly as intended.
The Ending Explained — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Disappointed, but in the most delightful way possible. I survived a cannibal dinner party, escaped through a hole in a fence with a werewolf, and made it all the way back to my apartment, and then Blair got me with a razor attached to a selfie stick. It was genuinely funny to be that close to a good ending and have it fall apart in the most ridiculous way. I’d explored enough routes and endings that I felt like I’d gotten the full experience, and even with the death at the end I felt completely satisfied walking away from this one.
Would I Reread It?
Yes, and I’m already planning to. I’m going to do this one again with my kids, which was actually CJ’s idea, and I think it’s going to be amazing. And CJ and I have already talked about making this a podcast episode down the road so we can compare notes on which choices we made and where we each ended up. With over 20 different endings, there is a lot of ground left to cover.
Who Is This For
If you love choose-your-own-adventure anything, this one is for you. It moves fast, the stakes are appropriately ridiculous, and it’s even better when you do it with someone else so you can argue about the choices in real time. If you have kids who are old enough to handle some dark content (people getting eaten, dying in various creative ways, one werewolf), this is absolutely a family activity. The “mating” option is a complete non-event, so don’t let that put you off giving it to a younger listener, and the horror is more campy than genuinely scary. It’s short enough to listen to in an afternoon and weird enough that you’ll want to go back and see what you missed.
Where to Get This Book
🎧 Audiobook
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Standalone | Genre: Mystery / Choose Your Own Adventure | Steam: 🔥
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