I picked this book up over the summer while at a comic convention – I’m not one for gore in movies at all, but the premise certainly intrigued me and gore in books is a little more…palatable, I guess. Though, note to self, I need to get better about checking didthedogdie.com before buying books. If I had known this site existed, I’d have saved myself endless trauma (mostly at the hands of Stephen King and Joe Hill….seriously, what does this family have against cats?)
That’s neither here nor there though, tl;dr here is a girl obsessed with slasher movies finds herself, possibly, inside a slasher movie of her very own. The book starts out in classic slasher fashion, but despite that, the books winds up being a lot of rumination on slasher, and a lot of time spent inside the protagonist’s head, and you don’t get to any actual slasher bits until close to the very end – so be forewarned there. The author is a multiple literary horror award winner, but for all of that, I expected the book to be a lot more gruesome. Maybe that’s just my modern sensibilities though, and the fact that in 2022 we kind of just expect everything to be dialed up to 11. The guys these awards were named for weren’t exactly quick to get the point, and even though Poe himself had plenty of gore in his stories, he had just as many that were creepy for the atmosphere alone.
That said, the killfest at the end is pretty fucked up, and made me thing of both GoT’s Red Wedding and the beginning of the James Gunn Suicide Squad movie.
The book, in spite of the massacre at the end, wound up being more about the horrors of a disadvantaged adolescence spent in the middle of nowhere, with parents who don’t care. Jade’s voice is unique enough that even if Stephen Graham Jones hadn’t described her physically I would have had a good idea what I was working with. That wound up being both a blessing and a curse, because while her narrative uniqueness served to really flesh her out as a character, it also made for a difficult read at times. I’m not comfortable reading someone who thinks conversationally, and because poor Jade has like zero friends, most of the novel is spent inside her own head.
That made, for me, for a very disjointed read, and I couldn’t quite figure out what was real and what wasn’t. There were points when I wasn’t even sure certain characters were real and I was almost positive we were gonna find out at the end that Jade was in a mental institution the whole time and had just made everything up. This made me at times kind of angry, because being a little ADD myself I appreciate a clear narrative, but the more I thought about it after I actually finished the more I realized that it’s kind of a stroke of brilliance on the author’s part – it builds the tension of the book and keeps you guessing (much like it does in an actual slasher) to the point where you don’t really have any idea what’s going to happen, which is kind of really smart when Jade spends the entire novel explaining all the nuances of slashers, to the point where she’d put Randy from Scream to absolute shame.
Jade is somewhat of an unreliable narrator, and while that helped add to the shock value of the ending, it also kind of confused me to the point that I’m still not 100% sure wtf happened out on that lake. Juxtapose this with the fact (as we are obviously supposed to do, I think) with the alleged sexual abuse by her father that winds up being not-at-all-alleged – I was honestly more shocked by that than I was at the implication that there really is a fucking lake witch killing people. Interestingly enough, I think it’s Jade’s home life, her life in general, that winds up being the real horror here, and I suppose that’s a big part of what makes her so uniquely suited to take on monsters, both literal and figurative, the way she does.
Keep It To Your Shelf 