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kjudgemental · 1 month

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The Southern Book Club's Guide To Slaying Vampires - Horror Novel Review

Author: Grady Hendrix Publisher: Quirk Books Country: USA Year: 2020 The last novel of Hendrix before his move to Titan Books for his next release (which would be The Final Girl Support Group) is, as he states in the introduction, a kind of companion piece for My Best Friend’s Exorcism, taking a look at the adventure of parenthood as opposed to the troubles of the teenage years. Here our…

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narcissistcookbook · 6 months

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short book review, The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix

I liked most of this a lot. The protagonist is a bunch of fun to follow around, there were some genuinely creepy bits and a couple of twists that caught me out. Unfortunately the story is let down by the very ending - the last three chapters felt half-baked.

Major spoilers after the break:

The triple twist about the killers got me. I thought I was smart for guessing it was Skye early on, but then I didn't bother thinking beyond that conclusion and was effectively sideswiped by Steph being in on it as well.

The whole finale though - from Steph driving away from a dying Lynnette, up through the arrival at Red Lake, to confronting the killers, and the final chapter - was so disappointing.

I loved that I kept finding out about the narrator's dirty secrets as the story unfolded. There was a point where I wondered if she'd been behind it.

The fakeout of Lynnette abandoning Steph at Chrissy's place fully got me and part of me wishes Hendrix had pulled the trigger on it, but it was fine that he didn't. After 3/4s of a novel spent finding out that the main character is kinda shit and useless, that would have been a fully earned twist.

The killers-using-guns subversion was deeply uninteresting - I get what Hendrix was trying to do I think, but guns don't belong in that world. They undo all the tension. I know Hendrix understands this because he explains it earlier in the story, so having the final confrontation be Lynnette running away from a dude with a machine gun felt totally out of touch. The observation the story implies is

"well why did you want a sequence full of brutal slayings, hmmm? what does that say about you? aren't you part of the problem?"

and like fuck off you know? I have a strong dislike for that kind of meta buck-passing. I'm reading the book because I enjoy spooks and grissliness, don't try and high road me about that right at the end.

Red Lake didn't feel like it made any sense as a setting for the finale either. It had little to no resonation with or meaning to the main character.

Given that Chrissy was the mirror image of Lynnette, Chrissy's murder museum would have been a better setting for a finale wouldn't it? Scream 6 ended up doing something like that two years after this book was published.

Heather was an interesting but underexplored character, and her reveal that there was probably something supernatural going on with her story was fun. Although I felt a little too spin-off baited by the last mention of her.

I'm not as down on as it as I sound. I enjoyed the book, I'm just sad that the ending was almost entirely botched because if the landing had been stuck it would have been a great story.

#grady hendrix #final girl support group #short book review

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prince-of-pages · 22 days

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reading update

small reading update for the day.

i'm about halfway through the winners, it has been going a bit slow for me but i honestly just think i'm in a physical reading slump and i'm trying to push through it. ugh.

next, i just started how to sell a haunted house by grady hendrix and im about an hour into it and its pretty good. i really like the buildup so far and the brother mark is so sus i feel like he has smth to do with the parents' death. idk though but that is my theory so far!

anyway, feel free to let me know what you're currently reading if you'd like or just let me know if you've read either of these so far!

until next time! probably tomorrow

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thegalaxyonherlips · 1 year

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Horrorstör (2014) // Grady Hendrix

CW: Gore, Violence, Death

Grady Hendrix "Horrorstör" is a cheeky masterpiece in the horror genre. Sly digs at both IKEA and the American retail job market make for a fun read. Absolute recommendation to anyone looking for ghost horror with a little spice.

#horror #horror book #horror review #book review #book recs #book rec #book recommendation #grady hendrix #horrorstör #horror books #book #review #readers #reading

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carriagelamp · 3 months

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Found some excellent horror-related and horror-adjacent books to read this month! Not a common genre for me, so this was fun. Really can't recommend Grady Hendrix as an author enough, Horrorstör was definitely my favourite novel from this month

Eric

I hate saying it because I love the Discworld and Terry Pratchett is easily my favourite author, but man Eric did not do it for me. You could see some good bones in it, but as far as I’m concerned all the interesting bits that appeared were done significantly better in later books. It had some humour moments, but the only bits that I really enjoyed were when the Luggage was around.

This story followed a young, teenaged, would-be demon summoner who, instead of summoning a demon, accidentally winds up with the incompetent and fearful wizzard Rincewind. Obligated to answer this kid’s wishes, they end up bouncing through time and space while attempting to survive what each wish had to throw at them.

Fantastic Mr Fox / Esio Trot / George’s Marvellous Medicine / The Enormous Crocodile

I went on a Dahl kick this month, I wanted to work through some of his shorter works that I’ve never bothered to read before. All of them were honestly delightful, I had a blast. Esio Trot was probably the weakest of the lot, but the other three were so much fun. The Fantastic Mr Fox may be my favourite just by virtue of being the most fleshed out, but listening to The Enormous Crocodile be read by Stephen Fry is an unparalleled experience.

Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy

A story I enjoyed more than I expected. I have a strange soft spot for hockey narratives, but that might just be the Canadian in me. Alix’s one true love is hockey, it’s the one place she feels competent and happy, but her team captain is making the space increasingly hostile until, unable to take the bullying, she strikes out and punches her captain. Shocked by her own violence and given an ultimatum by the coach to get her temper under control, she ends up going to popular and poised Ezra, hoping that he could show her how to deal with harassment without losing her cool in a way that scares her.

Horrorstör

Easily the best book I read this month, this book was amazing, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a “haunted house but in a knock-off Ikea” and I mostly picked it up as a joke because the premise sounded hilarious. But I was familiar with the author (I’d read The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires a couple years ago) and trusted him to do something interesting with the premise. And wow. Just wow. It is very much a classic, grisly, nauseating horror premise, but in a way that explores capitalism, exploitation, and treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill. It’s been a long time since I read a book that actually gave me chills, but I had to put this book down and walk away from it occasionally, it was intense enough.

The Kaiju Preservation Society

As a Pacific Rim lover, this book was everything I’d ever wish for it to be. It’s such a love letter to the kaiju genre as well as environmental conservation, and it’s speculative biology is fascinating!

After being fire from his job at the beginning of the Covid pandemic lockdown in New York City, Jamie Gray is barely making ends meet by acting as a delivery driver. He doesn’t know how he can possibly continue on like this, until he runs into an old friend who offers him a strange and intensely secretive job offer. With nothing to lose, Jamie agrees and finds himself on an alternate Earth, helping to study creatures that he only knows from campy monster movies, now very much real.

The Last Wish

Felt an urge to reread a Witcher book, so I’ve been picking my way through the short stories. They continue to be a lot of fun, and it felt good to reconnect with the original narrative voice again after reading a lot of fanfiction over the years. For anyone who has someone existed post-Netflix version without picking up the general premise: Geralt of Rivia is a "witcher", a person who was specifically trained to wield weapons and magics to hunt dangerous monsters that threaten humans. This is a collection of short stories that show Geralt on some of the various hunts he's had during the decades of his over-long life. (It's significantly better than the Netflix version, very much worth the read if you like classic high fantasy and/or fairy tale retellings.)

Mortimer: Rat Race to Space

A very dull youth novel. Mortimer is a lab rat at Houston who has aspirations to go on the space program and prove that rats are better suited for colonizing Mars than humans. If you’re a seven year old who wants to consume space facts, this is the book for you. For everyone else, it’s a bit of a slog.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism

Another Grady Hendrix book. This book was undeniably well-written, just as masterful as his others, but I didn’t enjoy it as much. A bit too much high school narrative and not enough all out horror. The conclusion was pretty decent, but the rest was… fine. A fun love letter to the 1980s though as you learn about two best friends and how they grow up together. ...A bit of a debate whether or not it warrants a queer marker or not, I'm not even going to make that attempt.

The One and Only Ruby

The newest book from the One and Only Ivan series. Much like The One and Only Bob this book was… fine. The original of the series was really wonderful and felt quite inspired, inspired by the real life story of a gorilla that’s kept in a small cage in a mall complex. The next two books take place after that one and each follows one of Ivan’s friends (Bob the dog and Ruby the baby elephant). A fun enough addition to the series, the art is still cute, and it has decent things to say about the hunting of endangered animals, but it was nothing amazing.

Paperbacks from Hell

Look, I really just felt the desperate need to read a bunch of Hendrix novels after being so violently consumed by Horrorstör. This is a nonfiction book in which Hendrix dives into the evolution and popular tropes of horror novels throughout the 1980s, with the cover art being the driving thesis throughout. You can tell how much he loves these weird, pulpy horrors and it makes you want to go and find a bunch of these and read them yourself. It really is an interesting book, even if you aren’t a great horror lover (which I wouldn’t consider myself).

The Salt Grows Heavy

Now this is a fucking novella. An absolutely unhinged, body-horror rich retelling of both The Little Mermaid and Frankenstein. Yeah. After the complete destruction of her husband’s kingdom at the hands (and jaws) of her own children, the Mermaid finds herself travelling with a mysterious Plague Doctor. I won’t go further into this except to say that the way it portrays morality, life, death, and the mutability of flesh is just… something else. Would recommend. But not if you have a weak stomach.

Scott Pilgrim

A classic. I watched the new animated series with my brother and felt the need to go back and reread the entire original series. Absolutely perfect, no notes, continues to be one of my all time favourite graphic novel series. The magical realism is just *chef’s kiss*.

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freshlybrewedbookreviews · 6 months

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My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

This is another fun one from Grady Hendrix, who does such a wonderful job of blending horror and comedy. My Best Friend's Exorcism is set in the 80s, so there's a lot of nostalgia for those of us on the older end of the millennial range. Can't really go wrong with a Hendrix if you like funny spooky reads!

#book review #freshly brewed #My Best Friend's Exorcism #Grady Hendrix #books #reading

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waldeswogen · 10 months

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Hace poco terminé ésta joya a la que le tenía muchas ganas...pero tengo sentimientos encontrados con el final...ustedes ya lo leyeron?

#book review #bookish #book #bookworm #reseña #male reader #reader #lector #grady hendrix #final girl support group #readers of tumblr #readers

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oosahwtf · 4 days

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For our second book for Book Club @zxromance chose Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix. I wasn’t very into this book so my report likely won’t be very in depth on this one as I don’t feel I have much to add. There also will not be any major spoilers in this report.

Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix is sort of a thriller novel based on the final girl trope from slasher movies. A final girl is the last girl left alive in a horror movie/book. There are some trigger warnings for murder, suicide, and general gore. It wasn’t very triggering or sad although the main characters are entirely consumed and driven by PTSD. It was a very easy read vocabulary wise but I found the characters so insufferable that I had to put the book down multiple times. The first half of the book was super annoying to me and didn’t really make a lot of sense, but the second half was pretty good.

I’ll start with my positives about the book although there isn’t a lot to say. I did enjoy the pacing as it was very fast moving and there was constantly something important happening. Although most of the plot was extremely predictable there was a nice little twist at the end that I did enjoy. I think this story would be a lot more enjoyable if told through a movie or tv show.

I have quite a bit of criticisms about this novel but I’ll try not to give too much detail as I don’t want to include spoilers. I found the characters so unlikeable and unrelatable that the book was almost unreadable for me. The only reason I didn’t put it down immediately was because of book club. I typically enjoy having an unlikeable main character if there is a purpose to it but I just felt there was no reason for how horribly annoying the characters were. I also felt a few events happened in the plot that didn’t really make sense and were completely unnecessary. Overall, I really liked the concept of this novel but I felt that it wasn’t well executed and would do better as visual media.

#bookblr #books and novels #novels #book review #book report #book club #thriller #slashers #suspense #grady hendrix #final girl #slasher #90s horror #horror books #final girl support group

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mrdcoolblue · 1 year

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Just finished reading How to Sell a Haunted House by Grady Hendrix 🐿️ This might be a cursed thing to do, but I felt compelled to draw Pupkin in my reading journal. Hopefully he won't attack me tonight and chase after me with his little nubbin feet!

Text ID: This book is terrifying and so insane that I would shout out in disbelief several times while reading. It's a survival horror with absurdly horrible puppets, complicated sibling relationships, and the traumas our families share (or don't).

"The things the dead leave behind linger like a curse, they hang around like ghosts . . . but every single item we put in the trash means there's that much less left behind of the people we loved. Throwing away their things feels like erasing their memories. It feels like exorcising their ghosts." /end ID

#how to sell a haunted house #grady hendrix #horror reads #book fanart #book #review #book recommendation #my art

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kjudgemental · 2 months

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The Final Girl Support Group - Horror Novel Review

Author: Grady Hendrix Publisher: Titan Books Country: USA Year: 2021 Anyone who knows me knows I love my Grady Hendrix. He’s the maestro of the self-aware horror homage novel, with titles such as My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Horrorstor making a massive splash when they landed. Giving the supernatural a break for a bit, he turns his hand to the slasher subgenre, which makes one wonder if you…

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brightbeautifulthings · 11 months

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The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix

"'Nightwalking men always have a hunger on them,' she croaked. 'They never stop taking and they don't know about enough. They mortgaged their souls away and now they eat and eat and never know how to stop.'"

Year Read: 2023

Rating: 3/5

About: Patricia is an upper-middle class housewife in the 90s, under-appreciated by her husband and kids, and the only bright spot in her week of cleaning, cooking, and shuffling the kids back and forth to school and activities is her true crime book club with the other Charleston moms. When a tall, dark, and charming stranger moves to the neighborhood, Patricia begins to suspect that he's responsible for recent attacks and disappearances. But who would ever believe her? Trigger warnings: character death (graphic, on-page), child death, pedophilia (on-page), rape (graphically described), animal death, child abuse, abduction, body horror, gore, dismemberment, severe injury, rats, implied anti-Semitism/Neo-Nazis, sexism (strong theme), racism, ableism, ageism, dementia. Graphic NSFW content.

Thoughts: This is another instance where I feel like a book is well-done, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. It might actually be Hendrix's most complicated and well-written novel to date. I just didn't like it. At the heart of this dislike is a simple preference in supernatural horror: I wanted more actual vampire in it. Of all the points, I felt like that aspect was the weakest. There's very little lore on Hendrix's vampires, and what's there seems more like a matter of convenience than consistency. (For example, if James can control creatures like rats, why does he not call on them when he's in danger?) What lore we do get is actually pretty gross. No sparkling Twilight vampires here. No fangs, even, which is just a bit sad.

My second issue is linked to that one, and it's that the vampire aspect is completely irrelevant to this story. It makes no difference whatsoever that James is a vampire. He could be literally any other male character in the story, any other normal human predator, and still accomplish all the same things, still put people, particularly women and children, in danger in exactly the same ways (except, granted, maybe the rat part). He's so terribly lackluster as a villain, just as arrogant and banal as your average scumbag rapist, child predator, or scamming embezzler. No fangs required, these things are already terrible. In part, this is one of the things the novel does well, since it highlights the cracks in our own culture. It's so easy for him to sway people to his side and turn husbands against their wives, but I prefer a better class of villain in my fiction.

I waver back and forth on my feelings for Patricia, but I think we're meant to. She doesn't always do the right thing, the women don't always have each other's backs, and she buckles under the pressure of keeping her life perfect and orderly, which is about what you'd expect from real life. If there's a character to pull for, it's actually Mrs. Greene, the Black caregiver who sees what's happening long before anyone else but is powerless to stop it. There's an obvious thread in there about how white, privileged people only care about awful things when it affects them, regardless of anyone else's children dying. (As a side issue, I also don't appreciate Hendrix's use of dementia for shock value. It's not edgy, just insensitive to people actually dealing with it.) It's gritty, dark, and gory, but the ending is satisfying in a way that bumped it back up to three stars for me.

#book review #grady hendrix #the southern book club's guide to slaying vampires #horror fiction #horror #3/5 #rating: 3/5 #2023

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prince-of-pages · 20 days

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another reading update

so i have about five hours left of how to sell a haunted house and i realllyyyyy hate these dolls/puppets.

i feel bad for blaming mark for stuff now i see his side of the story but i do have to admit he was being a bit sus in the beginning.

and the ring leader puppet? pupkin? yeah i don't fuck with him tbh.

its actually scary like? when you get to the fight scene in the house with the needle? yeah that one i was cringing so hard because i hate that stuff so much.

so far i would give it about 4.5 or even 5 stars, it's my type of creepy, an actual book that makes me cringe and be creeped out but not over the top like a slasher horror. i would recommend it so far!

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the-weed-and-read · 2 months

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Switching it up for a work book club! This will be my chores audiobook over the next few days.

#the southern book clubs guide slaying vampires #grady hendrix #theweedandread #weed&read #weedandread #booktok #weedreads #book thoughts #book reviews #book review #audiobook #libby

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bookthroneking · 4 months

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Book Review: Paperbacks from Hell by Grady Hendrix and Will Errickson

I love horror literature. I love reading analysis about important moments in pop culture, and I love funny, engaging nonfiction books. I was destined to enjoy Paperbacks from Hell.

Grady Hendrix's colorful, entertaining horror-spelunking owes a lot to Will Errickson's book blog, Too Much Horror Fiction, so I was already familiar with a lot of the material presented here and even read some of it (not as much as I'd like, but I'm working on it). That being said, it was an absolute delight seeing it all laid out together and neatly sorted into categories and eras. Hendrix's book celebrates a very specific literary era: the American paperback horror publishing boom that started in the late 60's and more or less ended by the mid-90's. It's a relentlessly enthusiastic and hilariously snarky recap of the era's trends, pitfalls, subgenres, and the joyous, absolute tastelessness of some of the paperback horror giants. (Mind the content warnings.) I have mixed feelings on Hendrix as a fiction writer, but he's a witty, engaging nonfiction author, who clearly has a lot of love for the genre and presents all its tasteful triumphs and tacky absurdities with equal delight. There's also a lot of iconic paperback cover art on almost every page: skeleton doctors, giant crabs wielding knives, murderous dolls and Gothic heroines are all represented among many others. This is a riotously fun collection which sheds light on an era that hopefully isn't as forgotten as non-horror nerds would think; it's a very informative read as well, with insight into the books', authors' and artists' backgrounds, brief bios of the larger names in paperback publishing, and even an appendix with a recommended reading list by Will Errickson. I owe a lot of incredibly fun reading hours to genre enthusiasts like Hendrix and Errickson, and I genuinely hope they helped to bring many buried gems and buried, uh... other things to a new generation of readers. Thoroughly recommended reading if you're a fan of horror books.

StoryGraph rating: 5

#book review #nonfiction #horror #horror literature #grady hendrix #2023 reads #bookworm #booklr #my posts

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thegalaxyonherlips · 1 year

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The Final Girl Support Group (2021) // Grady Hendrix

CW: Death, Suicidal Thoughts, Murder

"The Final Girl Support Group" has finally won me over to Grady Hendrix. Any mention to an 80s slasher tends to draw me in but, in this renaissance of 80s horror in literature, "The Final Girls Support Group" stands King of the crop.

The main protagonist, Lynette, continues to be delightfully dangerous throughout the novel, at some points not truly convincing me she was the correct one. The main plot of the final girls attacked, all feels like a mad woman pulling at strings at first. It all culminates into a homage to the 80s slasher.

Truly, a great sequel to some masters of horror.

#book #horror book #book review #book recommendation #book recs #book rec #grady hendrix #readers #reading

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maddie-grove · 1 year

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Little Book Review: General Fiction Round-Up (May-December 2022)

Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood (2013): In the final volume of Atwood's environmental dystopian trilogy (preceded by Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood), the survivors of a manmade eco-fascist plague, along with a population of genetically engineered humanoids, must try to make a life in the ruins. Atwood is one of my favorite authors and, while I generally prefer her non-speculative fiction, I really enjoyed the whole trilogy. She's really engaged with the ideas she explores (mostly related to GMOs and income inequality) and grounds them vividly in everyday life. I especially like the way the genetically engineered humanoids (the Crakers) process the world around them.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (2019): In the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood tells the story of three women in the same universe: a Commander's daughter in Gilead, a daughter of Mayday operatives living in Toronto, and Aunt Lydia, first seen "training" Handmaids in The Handmaid's Tale. I liked The Handmaid's Tale in high school, but I can't say I came away wanting to know more about that world...yet, as it turns out, I totally did want to know more about the pastel horrors of an elite Gilead girlhood. The audiobook is also top-notch, with Ann Dowd, Ann Whitman, and Bryce Dallas Howard doing the three main POVs.

Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link (2005): In nine "short" stories (many of them are quite long), Link writes about absurd things happening in mundane settings. Pretty Monsters, another short story collection of hers with some overlap, was one of my favorite books I read in 2014, but this time I wasn't feeling it. I'd already read the three best entries: "Stone Animals" (about a nebulously haunted house in a suburb of NYC), "Magic for Beginners" (about a mysterious TV show and a teen boy whose father is maybe trying to murder him via writing a novel), and "The Faery Handbag" (about a girl whose grandmother carries around an entire lost country in her purse). The others never really came together. I might have lost my taste for whimsy.

Dune by Frank Herbert (1965): In the very distant future, fifteen-year-old Paul Atreides has to move to a different planet for his father's work, and it only gets worse from there. I resisted reading Dune for the longest time because it sounded as dry as a desert planet where you have to reabsorb your own urine to survive. However, it fucks. I loved the layers of power dynamics and game-playing, especially in the scenes with Lady Jessica. Evil, horny Baron Harkonnen and his weirdly tragic nephew Feyd-Rautha were also great. I didn't like it so much after the time skip, though, and I think I'll give the sequels a pass.

The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix (2021): Paranoid and reclusive after being targeted twice by Christmas-themed killers, Lynette Tarkington's social life consists of a support group for "final girls" (women who have survived grisly massacres that were adapted into horror movies). I never quite got on board with this one, for two major reasons. The first is that I was irrationally annoyed by the idea that horror movies were seemingly all one-to-one true crime stories in this universe. That's on me. The second is that Hendrix never managed to convince me that most of these women had ever had a significantly positive relationship with each other. This novel could've been a Toast article.

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix (2014): Amy, a cash-strapped and unhappy twenty-something working at an IKEA knockoff, is offered a transfer to a better store if she'll stay after-hours to investigate some strange recent happenings. This isn't my favorite Hendrix novel; however, it is the fucking scariest. The characterization isn't as rich as it is in most of his other novels--I would describe it as efficient--but the pacing is effectively brisk and the nature of the fake-IKEA haunting almost made me shit my pants.

We Sold Our Souls by Grady Hendrix (2018): Kris Pulaski, once a guitarist/songwriter for up-and-coming heavy metal group Dürt Würk, now lives a life of resignation as a hotel night manager. Meanwhile, her ex-bandmate Terry Hunt is still a massively successful rock star after going nu-metal...and suddenly Kris has reason to believe that he did something truly sinister to make that happen. After My Best Friend's Exorcism, this is my favorite Hendrix novel. He's unusually moderate in putting his heroine through the mill, both in terms of physical peril and self-flagellation, and balances it with the joy she finds in her creative life. The otherworldly threat she faces is nicely chilling, and I loved the bittersweet ending.

Stranger Things: The Other Side by Jody Houser (2019): In this tie-in comic to Stranger Things, we see the first season from twelve-year-old Will Byers's point-of-view as he struggles to survive in the Upside Down. There's some good characterization of Will and a few cool visuals, but overall it's pretty inessential. The writing is kind of flat and sometimes awkward, and the art style is overall muddy and unappealing.

Mysterious Skin by Scott Heim (1995): Neil and Brian, two kids growing up in the same midsized Kansas town, both have life-altering traumatic experiences in the summer of 1981. Brian doesn't remember what happened, and comes to believe in the following years that he was abducted by aliens; Neil knows exactly what went on between him and his sexually predatory Little League coach, but that doesn't mean he understands it. Several years ago, I saw the 2004 movie version, which is amazing both as an adaptation and on its own terms: nuanced, well-paced, beautifully acted and shot, and faithful to all that's good in the source material. Unfortunately, this did slightly lessen the impact of the (also stellar) novel.

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss (2018): In the early 1990s, working-class seventeen-year-old Silvie spends a summer holiday in a Northumberland village, reenacting Iron Age life with her churlish history buff father, her downtrodden mother, a pompous anthropology professor, and three of his students. It's promising to be more miserable than your average family camping trip, between the lack of modern tech/food and Silvie's father's domestic tyrannies, but are we getting into The Wicker Man territory? This is a tense, deliciously creepy, and lyrical little novella that I finished in one evening because it was so exciting.

Normal People by Sally Rooney (2018): Withdrawn rich girl Marianne, despised at home and at school, starts a no-strings-attached relationship with working-class Connell, who's handsome and bright but kind of a follower. Thus begins an on-again, off-again thing that will follow them through college and change them forever. I really liked this romance between two troubled yet essentially sensible and sweet college students, although it's a bit slow at times. I especially enjoyed the first time that Connell and Marianne's power dynamic flips; she's kind of an It Girl at university, while he's out of his depth.

Summerwater by Sarah Moss (2020): Several families "enjoy" a miserable summer holiday by a Scottish lake over the course of a rainy day. We get the perspectives of several vacationers--judgmental moms, crotchety old men, worried newlyweds, teenagers desperate for wifi and privacy, anxious little kids--with several dark hints that someone will meet a terrible fate. Moss's writing is pleasurable to read and often funny, but I needed a damn flow chart for these people.

The Brittanys by Brittany Ackerman (2021): Brittany, a Floridian high school freshman in 2004, navigates life in her gated community and her suburban high school, hanging out with her friends (most of whom are also named Brittany) and wearing low-rise jeans. Maybe I was unduly influenced by the author being named Brittany, but this novel reads like a bunch of fond adolescent memories with the occasional gesture at some larger meaning. It feels like the author couldn't decide between trying to do an emotional mid-oughts coming-of-age story (like Lady Bird) or a slice-of-life portrait of a certain type of high school experience (like Fast Times at Ridgemont High). The stakes aren't high enough for the first (the biggest through-line is that Brittany's BFF Brittany might be a lesbian but neither of them seems to know it) and the scope isn't wide enough for the second. I think the book would've been better off as, like, two short stories.

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