Dead Girls Walking is YA horror that fails to kill

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, good marketing and not judging a book by its cover walk into a bar. Marketing assures the book that the issues impacting its wider enjoyment will be mitigated by the niche appeal and box-checking demographics. After all, an mglit book whose main character is going to a queer, horror-obsessed overnight camp for girls is ripe for crossover appeal.  Toss in the fact that the author is a Black queer horror writer who is inspired by the culture’s relation to the supernatural. Alas, this is where I need to stop all but the most devout readers who read books by their sense of obligation, as opposed to their overall enjoyment, and put forth that this is not the horror book that the masses are looking for.

Temple is our heroine, the daughter of a serial killer everyone in the region knows. He’s in jail for multiple murders, one of which was his wife, Temple’s mother, which she has always doubted. The man who was murdering people. He was murdering these people with Temple’s awareness as well, so she’s familiar with various means and methods of homicide and body disposal.

Because Temple doesn’t think that her father killed her mother, and the fact that more people are still being killed, she impersonates a camp counselor at the aforementioned lesbian camp for girls who enjoy horror. Once she’s at the camp her true identity is eventually discovered and a bigger, more invasive evil than just a normal person killing people is revealed.

Horror-based mglit is not based in reality and nobody expects their plot to adhere to things that could really happen. The blurbs on the back of Dead Girls Walking harken the book to an Evil Dead or Fear Street vibe. However, both of those would be a false flag and instead, I would put the book in the Venn diagram of black lesbians who curse a lot and want to read horror that doesn’t actually burn with brutality or blood until the final sixth act. Those same folks also want the preceding five acts to be loaded with teen drama, lots of F-bombs and tedious scenes of teens pretending to be holding back information relevant to the other one.

The setup for Temple’s adventure is too long and overly dramatic unless you’re in the camp of the last sentence in the previous paragraph. Unless you have the vocabulary of a ninth-grader who just discovered the colloquial word for sexual intercourse, the dialogue in the first quarter of Dead Girls Walking will leave you pining for a thesaurus to help the character use other words when she’s frustrated or angry. The narrative chapters are interspersed with faux book reviews of things that the characters have in common, dialogue that they had on social media, or posts that they left on the camp website. This device is one that mglit readers will appreciate because it’s the way that they communicate, and Dead Girls Walking is not the sort of book that you’ll accidentally fall into.

It drags too slowly to be a horror book that crackles with energy. The teenage and family drama is too tedious to maintain readers who simply want a good, gory time. The idea of a teen girl looking for her mother’s dead body that was butchered by her father has seeds of fun it is inception. Slasher book fans will especially be looking at the hypothetical watch on their wrists during the book’s second half when it loses some of its focus and meanders over too many directions. The focus goes sideways quickly and the Evil Dead, black humor kills and sickness that could’ve been, never materializes.

Dead Girls Walking is by Sami Ellis and is available on Abrams Books.

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