No, I cannot. I am alive, and I am a middle-aged guy, not a freshly murdered teenage girl. Also, to be honest, coming back to life for, like, only a week sounds like it would suck. But damn if they don’t get their kicks in for those seven days.
What I’m trying to say is, I’ve picked up many a horror novel on the strength of the enticing cover art and splashy title, only to abandon it a chapter or two in because the only thing frightening is how much time and money was wasted on the author’s education, since he clearly can’t write to save his life. This is not one of those books. Lily Anderson’s Undead Girl Gang lives up to the promise of its title and the cover art of the cute teen girl’s denim jacket that you just know conceals a heart of darkness within.
And sister, it is dark at Fairmont Academy somewhere out in sunny California. As the novel opens our heroine, student Mila Flores, is grieving the suspicious drowning death of her best friend, Riley Greenway. The impressively lazy and stupid local cops have ruled her death a suicide, along with the even more shocking recent deaths of classmates June Phelan-Park and Dayton Nesseth, whose bodies were found hanging from trees in the park. Not that Mila even pretends to give a shit about the earlier suspicious fatalities, seeing as how they were ultra-mean girls and she was always the picked-on outcast, a Mexican girl who dresses funny and dabbles in Wicca along with Riley, who was also something of a pariah because her family runs a funeral home.
So what’s a young, outcast witch to do? Why, resurrect her best friend of course! Unpleasantly for all concerned, though, the spell is only good for a week, and Mila gets three for the price of one, June and Dayton turning up at Riley’s graveside on the same midnight. Now the four must race against time to do the cops’ work for them and prove that the undead girls didn’t kill themselves… even though none of them can remember what did happen to them.
Anderson neatly avoids the trap I’ve noticed some otherwise enjoyable novels with supernatural premises falling into, of specifying overly rococo rules of the game. All our heroines have to remember is the one-week deadline, the loss of memory about their own deaths, and oh yeah… the undead start to go all zombie if they wander more than one hundred paces from their witch.
I love female-written horror like this, not for diversity’s sake alone but because there are certain aspects of women’s experience that are very difficult for men to capture, and all of us horror fans know the nauseating tendency of certain male writers and moviemakers to treat female characters as beautiful bodies waiting to be mutilated. Here we have the polar opposite. The writing is fresh, funny, and horrifying, the depiction of teenage anguish and grief is genuine, and the solution to the mystery a genuine surprise. Highly recommended.
[bctt tweet=”Can I Please Join the Undead Girl Gang? by Martin Berman-Gorvine @MeshuggeWriter – BOOK REVIEW ‘Undead Girl Gang’ by Lily Anderson” username=”theboldmom”]
