Christina Henry has more than made a name for herself in the horror sphere, building tales of women facing incredible terrors and maybe, just maybe, making it to live another day. This time around, rather than a singular high-concept premise, Henry has three of them in one – and the mystery of how they intersect is just one of the many surprises, twists, and turns, at the heart of Good Girls Don’t Die.
The book’s neat conceit follows a trio of heroines – Celia who awakens with no memory of her previous life, now cosily ensconced in coastal suburban domesticity, Allie, a film-savvy college student taking a weekend trip with friends to a remote cabin in the woods, and Maggie, who finds herself trapped in an underground arena with a score of other women, fighting to survive and escape the deadly trials.
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The most enjoyable element to the excellent Good Girls Don’t Die is the meta aspect to the story – each subgenre being explored is treated with deep appreciation and respect, whether that’s the metatextual tension of Allie’s tale, evoking an eighties’ slasher, or Maggie enduring a mysterious, deadly competition to try and get home to her young daughter, evoking clear dystopian horror. Best of all is Celia’s scenario which changes from a cosy crime tale (here’s looking at you Hallmark!), into something far more insidious.
This exploration proves to be a useful vehicle for our heroines to explore gender in the horror sphere; each heroine is surrounded by women who fit into the roles prescribed to them. Villain, victim, final girl. When the body count continues to rise in Good Girls Don’t Die, it’s to Henry’s credit that the ways that women have been treated by the genre continues to take precedence amongst the bloodshed. Even the title is a fun subversion – our heroines are flawed, certainly, but so are those women surrounding and opposing them.
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Buoyed along by no small-amount of self-referential charm, Good Girls Don’t Die is both a celebration of the micro-genres it inhabits and a rip-roaring thriller in its own right. Guided by Henry’s skill at character work and some outlandish, audacious twists that by and large stick the landing, Good Girls Don’t Die proves itself to be a wildly entertaining and wholly cathartic examination of women in horror and how they might fight to survive.
Good Girls Don’t Die is out now from Titan Books.
