The Dead Girls Club Review

 

I received a free advance reader copy of this book in return for an honest review. I’m leaving this review voluntarily.

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Four friends. Two pieces of a necklace. One death. One dark secret never meant to be discovered.

The Dead Girls Club is a book split into two parts. One part takes place some 30-ish years in the past, and tells the story of four young girls who are obsessed with murder and serial killers. The second part takes place in the present, when everyone is grown up and living their own separate lives.

But one life is about to be severely interrupted when our narrator, Heather, receives a piece of mail containing an item she hasn’t seen since the night her best friend Becca died. Half of a Best Friends necklace; the other half of which she already has.

Scared and paranoid, Heather begins an investigation into just who sent her the necklace, and we find out just what led up to the events of Becca’s death. 

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First and foremost, this book reminded me instantly of Pretty Little Liars. A group of girls, led by a somewhat bitchy queen bee, breaks up after the death of said queen bee. Years later, something resurfaces that disrupts lives, and an investigation ensues to find out where it came from and why.

Right off the bat, I can say that I like child-Heather more than adult-Heather. Adult-Heather is rather self-absorbed, and although she’s a youth psychologist, with her main clientele being troubled kids, she always seems to be more interested in her own things rather than her patients. She also seems like an awful wife; being short-tempered with her husband, and lying to him.

The author is also very fond of sentence fragments. Sometimes these can work, since it gives a sense of desperation or franticness to what’s happening, but when it happens over and over and over again, it kind of loses its punch.

Going back to Heather; I don’t know if she’s always been this attentive to her patients, or if this only started happening after that necklace turned up, but she’s an awful therapists. These are children she’s supposed to be helping; troubled children who really need someone. But she’s far too wrapped up in what’s going on with her own life to care much about them.

Admittedly, I’ve never murdered anyone and hid their body, but does paranoia really set in that fast? It went zero to a million in the space of a couple of pages. Maybe she was always that paranoid and it was lurking just beneath the surface, but I can’t imagine she spent 30-ish years of her life being as twitchy as she is.

Almost immediately after the necklace is sent to her, she starts flaking on her job, stalking ex-friends, and paying shady internet sites to get her personal information on people. Every conversation her friends or family try to have with her inevitably end up causing more paranoid thoughts. Every shadow turns into someone watching her. Every random object is somehow connected to Becca, her dead friend. She begins feeling, hearing, and smelling things that aren’t there. She develops nervous habits, such as picking at her skin to the point it bleeds. Obsessed with her old friends, she starts cyber-stalking them, and physically stalking them, looking for any excuse she can find to “accidentally” meet up with them. Anyone who gets close to her is suspected of spying. She gets suspicious of her husband, who seems to be getting a lot of strange phone calls.

We also get the most cliche trope in the horror books: breathing over the phone before hanging up. That one is so old it’s not even scary anymore.

(Also, I know there’s a famous saying among authors that goes “Said is not dead”, but can someone please inform this author that there are other words to use than “says”? I counted six uses of it on one page alone.)

Interestingly, not only does this book take place in two different time periods, but it also takes place in two different tenses. THEN scenes are written in past tense, while NOW scenes are written in present tense. I thought this was clever, as it really feels like things are happening many years removed from each other.

We get a lot of name drops, both THEN and NOW, and I’m not sure if they’re supposed to be shoutouts as a fan, or something else, but it’s a frequent occurrence. 

As Heather’s investigation continues, she becomes more and more disconnected from reality, to the point that I’ve questioned more than once how much was taking place in her head, and how much was actually happening. She’s clearly become an unreliable narrator, but was she already unreliable before she received Becca’s half of the necklace, or did that only happen afterwards? For that matter, could she have been unreliable from the very beginning, when she was only twelve years old?

The Red Lady is probably the most interesting part of the book to me. The idea of a woman being accused of witchcraft and punished isn’t a new one, but the author brings a fresh twist to it that I really liked.

She brings the biggest air of mystery to the book, constantly keeping you questioning whether she’s real, or if she’s just a made-up story. Are the things Heather experiences both as a child and an adult because of a supernatural presence, or are they the first signs of a fragile mind coming unraveled?

I know I’ve complained a lot about Heather, and that may come off as disliking the book. But the truth is, I loved it. Heather is the kind of main character that’s fun to hate. And I know that I shouldn’t hate her, because something is clearly not right with her, so all of this isn’t a case of her willfully behaving the way she is, but… I don’t know, I just can’t bring myself to like her, and I was okay with that. I looked forward to finding out what new downward spiral she would get into as the book progressed.

The ending was a pleasant surprise. I thought I knew how it was going to end; I had two scenarios that I was sure were going to end up happening. I was wrong on both counts, which I appreciated. Books like this are best when you can’t predict the ending, and I wasn’t able to.

I highly, highly recommend reading this book.

(Actual score: 4.6/5)