Return

"Have you talked to your dad?" Julie asks me.

Mae gives a mini gasp. Molly clears her throat and begins to chug water.

My family situation is in the trunk of topics we keep hidden under the floorboards, along with my fumbles after college, Julie's eating disorder, Mae's not being out to he conservative parents and Molly's cancer-consumer childhood. We dance on top of these floorboards, and though sometimes they squeak, we don't acknowledge it. We pretend we've forgotten about the trunk and what's inside it, even though we all know it's there, beating against our denial like the telltale heart.

This book is marketed as a horror book first and foremost, and it definitely hit the mark in that regard, but the biggest thing I took away from this book was it's super-accurate portrayal of close friendships. Maybe I've just been reading too much historical fiction lately, but it was so refreshing to finally read dialogue that sounds like how real human beings talk to each other.

Basically we have four girls (who each are fleshed out and personified so well that I feel like I can imagine how they'd act in hypothetical situations) who met in undergrad and naturally started to drift apart after college, despite their best efforts. They're brought together again after one of them, Julie, goes missing. Our narrator and Julie's closest friend, Elise, is in full denial, even after staging a "funeral" for Julie on the anniversary of her disappearance and multiple heart-to-hearts with her surviving two friends. She ends up being right however, when Julie returns after going missing for two years, unharmed and apparently without any memory of what happened.

All this happens in just the first chapter, and I think it was a smart decision to sort of fast-forward through the setup so we can get to the rest of the story. Mae, the resident mom-friend of the group, decides to set up a girl's weekend at a bougie new hotel isolated deep in the Catskills, and strange things start happening almost immediately, mostly centered around Julie's new behaviors. This results in a lot of genuinely awkward situations that would have me jumping out of a window.

Without giving too much away, the buildup felt appropriately paced, the payoff/reveal felt sufficiently horrifying and the climax was pretty damned intense without feeling like a completely out-of-left-field tone shift. It's a serviceable horror novel that holds up, but to me it feels more like an analysis of female friendships dressed up in the trappings of a scary story. It just hit on so many aspects of my own relationships like knowing each other's histories but choosing not to bring it up, feelings of jealousy, feelings of "do they actually like me, or do they just tolerate me?", feelings of "I love all my friends, but everyone knows me and X are the closest", feelings of drifting apart as you get older and missing the good ol' days, etc. It wasn't too hard to map these characters over people I know in real life.

The one thing I did not care for was when they crashed early one night when they tried getting drunk and basically complained, "Oh my god, I can't drink like we used to anymore, when did we get so old? We're almost twenty seven!"

Meanwhile my thirty two-year-old ass is sitting here like :/