New Arrival: The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters

The coming of age novel is a timeless trope because it is a guaranteed universal experience. Everyone has had that experience where they realize that the adult world is far different and far more complicated than that of a child. This transition often includes a loss of innocence, but in a horror coming of age tale, that loss of innocence is practically guaranteed, once the protagonist realizes that there are many things out there in the adult world with very sharp teeth. Heather, the protagonist in Damien Angelica Walter’s The Dead Girls Club, must deal with a loss of innocence that haunts her well into adulthood.

The story has two narratives. The first has Heather at 12, who enjoys hanging out with her friends, especially her best friend Becca, about serial killers and the Red Lady, a ghost story that develops an unlife of its own. The other has Heather as a child psychologist who receives a heart-shaped pendant in the mail that once belonged to Becca before she died. What follows is a descent into paranoia for Heather as she realizes someone knows of her involvement in Becca’s death and a mystery as to whether or not she is being haunted by the Red Lady. By looking at Heather’s past and her friendship with the members of the Dead Girls Club, readers are pulled along as the book teases us with what happened to Becca, along with a breakneck conclusion that tantalizingly leaves the reality of the Red Lady. Is she still fiction or is she much more?

This ambiguity of supernatural forces, a prime example of this being Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, may confuse some readers but it ultimately adds to the story’s power. A cold spot in a house can be explained away by drafts and the creaking in an old house could just be the structure settling, but when the protagonist hears a house groan in almost human tones or feels a chill where there are no windows, their mind starts to race as they search for an explanation. When none is satisfactory, the only options left are for the protagonist to feed the ghost by giving it a reality in his or her head or to accept the ambiguity. Tremblay and Walters understand that supernatural malevolence, whether in a house or a spooky story, is given power by the people who experience it and retell it.