YMMV / Point Horror

• Contested Sequel: The relaunch books released from 2013-2014 have been met with a mostly negative reception from Point Horror fans, mainly due to them all being social media themed and trying too hard to seem current with modern readers.
• Funny Moments: Darker has one, courtesy of Nick's Deadpan Snarker dad.
  Nick's Dad: Is everything alright?
  Nick: Nothing a trip to Tesco won't cure.
  Nick's Dad: If Tesco is the cure, I don't want the illness.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Final Exam, published in 1990, is a teen horror story set in a Columbine High School, as seen on the cover. The author A. Bates explains why she chose the name in this Reddit post, stating that she was from Colorado and at the time her daughter was attending an alternative school in Longmont called Olde Columbine.
• Idiot Ball: For some reason the passengers aboard the titular Fright Train don't twig that they are literally on the train to Hell until the Devil explicitly points this out, despite this being one of the most obvious depictions of Fire and Brimstone Hell. The intense heat? The smell of sulfur? Imps barging on board to torment everyone? Nope, still clueless. Even when everything is revealed, several characters have not yet gotten the message that they died in the train crash.
• Nausea Fuel: Skinners from Unleashed features a cult that controls dead bodies by wearing their skins. The climax has the protagonists use this ability to kill them and they are outright disgusted by the experience.
• Rooting for the Empire: The forces of Hell in Fright Train. While they are unpleasant and sadistic, they're simply doing their job of punishing some truly abhorrent individuals (the passengers, save for the protagonists are guilty of causing at least one horrific death, whether deliberately of accidentally). To make matters worse, the forces of Heaven don't intervene to get Darren and Vicky out of there before it's too late. If Vicky hadn't had her and Darren's birth certificates, both of them would have faced an eternity of torture for the crimes of the couple they accidentally bumped into on the platform.
• The Scrappy:
  • Martha of Trick or Treat is largely hated by most Point Horror readers and numerous reviews describe her as being incredibly whiny and self centered. It doesn't help she spends most of the book being angry at her dad for remarrying and forcing her to move into a new house with her stepmom and stepbrother, the former doing nothing but trying to make Martha happy and the latter trying to be patient with her rotten attitude.
  • Devnee from Return of the Vampire is also unpopular, mainly for her vapidness and how viciously she hates her parents and brother, whose sole crime seems to be that they are a slightly boring middle-class family.
  • Frank and Hildy from April Fools. The entire story is kicked off by Frank thinking it would be hilarious to run someone off the road for honking the horn at them. After this accidentally causes the other car to crash and explode, the pair immediately start hounding the protagonist, Belinda, to keep quiet and to stop being so depressed over the whole thing. It doesn't help that their biggest concern is Frank getting kicked off the swimming team for drunk driving and that Hildy's parents would forbid her from seeing him again if they found out what he did.
  • Stu and Jane from Scissorman are outright horrible protagonists. They bully their stepbrother to the point of trauma and neglect their pet rabbits so they are left to fester in their own poop until their stepmother forces them to get their act together. It's hard to feel sympathy for them in the second half of the book when they're the one's being terrified half to death. (The rabbits didn't deserve such a gruesome end, though.)
• The Woobie: Some from Unleashed.
  • Johnny from The Bogle in Unleashed. His mother is dead, his father is always away on business, his older brother is mean to him and he's moved from London to Scotland to a creepy house with a strict and grouchy housekeeper. And if all that's not bad enough, the Bogle manages to get a hold of him and spends the rest of the book terrorising him as it slowly drains his life away. Oh, and he's six years old.
  • One-shot character Michael from Moonchildren. He's a homeless man who's had visions of angels since he was a young child and was put into a children's mental institution to try and cure him of the visions. On adulthood he's "released into the community" and effectively left on the streets to fend for himself. Yet despite all this, he's incredibly cheerful and kindhearted but scares people due to his odd behaviour. He's attacked by the werewolf villain of the story and only survives because "an angel" saves him. He gets mentioned in a later scene by a much tougher and more cynical homeless man as one of the nicest people in the area who didn't deserve the mauling he got.
  • Cassandra Blackthorn from Amy suffers horrific physical abuse from her husband and lives in absolute terror of him. That being said, it's clear she cared deeply about her daughter and tried to protect her but was too scared to leave her husband. Unfortunately, the one time she goes behind his back and lets Amy go trick or treating she comes home late so Cassandra has to hide her when her husband is in one of his rages. This results in her accidently knocking her daughter down the stairs and breaking her neck. Believing her to be dead, Cassandra dumps her in a nearby bog and where Amy actually dies. Fortunately, Amy comes back as a ghost and possesses the protagonist to tell her mother she knows it was an accident and she forgives her. By the end of the book, she's been let off for her daughter's death, has left her husband and is working at the local diner under the protection of a tough as nails fellow waitress.