TITLE: The Dead Girls Club
AUTHOR: Damien Angelica Walters
280 pages, Crooked Lane Books, ISBN 9781643851631 (hardcover)
DESCRIPTION: (from Goodreads): Red Lady, Red Lady, show us your face...
In 1991, Heather Cole and her friends were members of the Dead Girls Club. Obsessed with the macabre, the girls exchanged stories about serial killers and imaginary monsters, like the Red Lady, the spirit of a vengeful witch killed centuries before. Heather knew the stories were just that, until her best friend Becca began insisting the Red Lady was real--and she could prove it.
That belief got Becca killed.
It's been nearly thirty years, but Heather has never told anyone what really happened that night--that Becca was right and the Red Lady was real. She's done her best to put that fateful summer, Becca, and the Red Lady, behind her. Until a familiar necklace arrives in the mail, a necklace Heather hasn't seen since the night Becca died.
The night Heather killed her.
Now, someone else knows what she did...and they're determined to make Heather pay.
MY RATING: 5 out of 5 stars
MY THOUGHTS:
I have a definite soft spot for horror stories in which it is left up to the reader to decide whether the supernatural elements are real or are just figments of the characters’ imaginations. Damien Angelica Walters’ The Dead Girls Club feels like one of those novels; almost every scene involving the supernatural can also be explained as something more mundane. At several key points in the narrative, I found myself questioning whether The Red Lady was real at all, or just Heather’s subconscious way of justifying what happened to her childhood friend. But at other points, I was convinced The Red Lady was very, very real. (In fact, I had to go looking on the internet to find out if this particular take on a “red lady” was a real urban legend or Walters’ creation.)
Walters’ legend of “The Red Lady,” as told in bits and pieces by the doomed Becca, is a brilliant twist on the trope of a ghost/demon who comes when you enact a specifically-worded ritual. At the same time, it’s also a commentary on the very nature of storytelling: that details become more true the more people there are who believe those details. We see it all the time in our current culture: stories spread across the media and internet, conjecture morphing into fact as more people repeat the story. Whether Becca is making The Red Lady up out of whole cloth or The Red Lady is slowly feeding her own story to Becca (replete with the types of contradicting details such stories gather along the way) doesn’t matter – the effect the story has on her small circle of friends, and most especially on her best friend Heather, is the same. And as with the sharing of so many similar urban legends, or so much other misinformation in our modern world, the results of their belief turn to tragedy.
But on its own, the legend of The Red Lady is just that: a story told in a dark basement. It would be a good enough short story or novella, but it gains extra resonance woven together with the other narrative strands of the book: the present day Heather’s increasingly paranoid reaction to hints sent her way that someone knows what happened that night, and flashbacks to the summer leading up to Becca’s death.
Walters keeps those two strands of story distinct by working in different types of tension. For the flashbacks, where we know from the beginning that Becca will die by Heather’s hand, the tension is all in the build-up, the slow-boil reveal of what happened to bring them to that moment and the question of whether Becca’s death was supernatural or not. In the present-day scenes, the tension is in figuring out who is haunting (or “haunting”) Heather; there’s a healthy list of viable suspects that would make Agatha Christie proud, not even including the possible supernatural entity. Each time Heather rules a non-supernatural suspect out it feels like another takes their place, while the ghost of Becca and the threat of The Red Lady hang over everything. The dovetailing denouement of the present and past storylines is perfectly crafted, crashing the “whodunnit” and “howdidithappen” tensions against each other. The final scenes are pretty brutal, both in physical violence and in emotional pay-off, and completely well-earned.
In Heather, Walters also takes on the “final girl” trope. Although she can’t remember exactly what happened in the aftermath of Becca’s death, Heather survived and moved on. But she carries the scars of that (possible) interaction with the supernatural, of being the one that survived, with her into adulthood. It motivates her to help other damaged children but of course can only simmer for so long. Her survivors’ guilt and carefully-guarded PTSD unravel her professional and personal lives as she obsesses over finding out who else knows what happened that night and drops all the guards she’s built up. It’s a twist on the trope, and also a very honest look at how repressed emotions find their way out eventually.
Overall, The Dead Girls Club is a well-crafted blending of genres: part urban legend, part classic mystery, part thriller. Fans of any one of those genres will enjoy it. Fans of more than one of those genres will love it.