A decades-old friendship that dissolved in the face of pre-teen obsession with a ghost story. A missing girl and a wrongly-imprisoned mother. And now, thirty years later, someone who knows who killed twelve-year-old Becca all those years ago and who is bent on getting their revenge. Add in an unreliable and mostly unlikeable narrator to pull The Dead Girls Club together and what you have is something that should be great, but which falls, unfortunately, slightly flat.

Told in two timelines by Heather, that unreliable narrator, who was one of four girls that comprised the serial-killer-loving Dead Girls Club. We’re told right off the bat that Heather killed Becca, but she has spent a long time repressing what happened to her best friend, Becca, in the basement of a vacant house - maybe even trying to make up for it (which is probably the only explanation for her nonsensical career choice as a child psychologist). Then, one day, right as Becca’s mother, convicted of murdering her daughter, is released from prison, Heather receives the other half of a necklace she hasn’t seen in years - Becca’s necklace.

As more long-hidden items reappear in different places and Heather starts to unravel, she becomes more and more erratic and risks everything to find out who her stalker is, and what they know.

Alongside the present day, we delve through the past and into the minds of two young, very different pre-teen girls, their unusual obsession, child abuse, and a little bit of mass hysteria through the story of the Red Lady - a terrifying manifestation of Becca’s desire to escape her situation.

Was the Red Lady real, and who is it that knows what really happened in that vacant house?

What I Loved: There were a few, very good, misdirects and our big-bad is someone you definitely don’t expect. Pacing is pretty good (once you get through the somewhat slow start), and overall, Damien Angelica Walters has created a fleshed-out cast of characters, and a delightfully creepy vibe.

What I Didn’t Love: This book was busy - there was just so much going on, it was difficult to keep track at times. And while I ordinarily love to hate unlikeable characters, I just couldn’t find anything redeemable about Heather and her multitudes of stupid decisions, which made it difficult to connect.

Conclusion: Less supernatural and more psychological, the themes of this one will suit some and not others. Damien Angelica Walters is good at what she does and I am looking forward to seeing more of her work.

Teens are often intrigued by stories, most of them often made up. But it's an entirely different ball game when a teen uses made-up legends to kill one of her peers. Thinking she'd buried it twelve feet under, the murder comes back up thirty years later and throws our main character for a loop that she's unlikely to escape now as easy as she did before.

Ghosts, murder and lies, oh my! Damien Angelica Walters knocked it out of the park with this horror/thriller. It begins in the early nineties with a group of young girls who like to hang out together and tell each other scary ghost and murder stories. Heather and Becca had always been the best of friends- that is until the Red Lady. When Becca seemed to become obsessed with the ghost from one of the stories everything seemed to change and it seemed that Heather had lost her best friend. Until she actually did lose her best friend. Becca was murdered soon after and nothing would ever be the same. Was the Red Lady to blame? The book then jumps forward to present day when Heather receives Becca's necklace in the mail. The past has come back to haunt her and now Heather may have to pay. This story is completely engrossing and a little bit creepy so leave the nightlight on and enjoy!

I had really high hopes for this novel, but it never quite hit the mark for me. I was hoping to be a little more surprised by twists but there's too much given away in the description to really call this a thriller. I was also hoping to be hooked by the characters but that never quite happened for me either as they all came across as fairly flat to me and I had a tough time keeping track of everyone. It was cool to see a character with my first name though since I do see fictional Lauren's all that often. Overall, The Dead Girls Club has a lot of potential but it just didn't quite work out for me.

Det här är spänning på hög nivå!
he Dead Girls Club är inte bara fantastiskt välskriven, den helt omöjlig att lägga ifrån sig.

Det här vet vi.
Heather och hennes bästa vän Becca skapar The Dead Girls Club när de är 12 år. Klubben för blodiga och kittlande berättelser om verkliga seriemördare som Ted Bundy och John Wayne Gacy blandat med påhittade spökhistorier. Klubben består av fyra tjejer som träffas i en källare i ett övergivet gammalt hus. Men under sommaren förvandlas leken till allvar.
Närmare 30 år senare får Heather ett brev med posten. I brevet ligger halsbandet Becca hade på sig den kvällen då Heather dödade henne.
Men ingen vet vad hon gjorde. Åtminstone är det vad Heather tror.
The Dead Girls Club lockar fram den vetgiriga och blodlystna 12-årigen i mig igen. Som Heather läste jag också alla Stephen King-böcker som gick att få tag i (på stadsbiblioteket i Ö-vik) och inget var för läskigt förrän alla hårstrån på kroppen rest sig upp. Det finns en allvarlig underton i The Dead Girls Club, en påminnelse om barns utsatthet, men framförallt är det non stop spänning som gäller. Hjärnan jobbar på högvarv. Vem kan det vara? Hur hänger allt ihop? Vem är den röda damen? Särskilt njutbart är beskrivningen av de unga tjejerna. Dom är precis så utsökt egensinniga och mångfasetterade som unga tjejer faktiskt är och det är en njutning i sig att läsa om Heather, Becca, Rachel och Gia. Och om den röda damen..

I loved, loved, LOVED that this book took place in Maryland. I know this won't apply to as many people, but I loved finding little nods to where I live.

I found the plot unique, and enticing. I wanted to keep reading until I found out exactly what happened so many years ago that drove the main characters apart and ended with one of the girls dead.

I recommend this to anyone who wants a thriller with a hometown feel.

I enjoyed this book a lot. The story is well crafted, and well written. The characters are believable, and the story arc makes sense. You don’t need to make constant leaps of logic to follow along (although still some, admittedly).

And the cover – I love it…but I also kind of hate it. I feel like it was probably a publisher-chosen cover, since it honestly has zero connection to the story (which makes me like it less), but still… it’s wonderful. It’s dark and mysterious, but also beautiful. But I hate that it has, as I mentioned, nothing to do with the story, which is silly. If you’re going to go to the trouble to have a graphic on the cover, at least let it have some peripheral connection to what the book is about. Otherwise, why bother? Just put the name in some fancy font or something… I would have gone with one of Becca’s drawings, or a red ribbon, maybe some candles. Something, anything that ties to the contents of the book.

But I digress. Back to the story:

I really felt for the children – the adults, a little less so, but still… Being a kid is hard – telling reality from fantasy when you’re a child in a crazy situation can be hard. Children’s minds are complex and bendable, and for that reason I feel that this story has legs – it could have been something we see on the news. In fact, it has been. Just remember a few years back there was the so-called Slenderman Stabbings which thankfully didn’t result in anyone dying, but very easily could have.

Because I believe that the story’s past scenario could have played out in reality, I think I was more forgiving of the modern-day-stalker storyline that played out alongside it. Because honestly, that all felt a little bit too tidily wrapped up for my tastes. There were a lot of completely separate pieces in motion to have acted out such a neat choreography, in my opinion. But, again, based on the linchpin for the whole story being so believable, and Walters’ bang-up job of tension building, I didn’t let it bother me too much.

Damien Angelica Walters has written a few other books before The Dead Girls Club. Cry Your Way Home, Paper Tigers, and Sing Me Your Scars (which won This is Horror’s Short Story Collection of the Year). I have not read any of them, but after reading this one, I wouldn’t turn them away if ever I came across them. She has proven herself to be a deft storyteller with an eye for the macabre, which I go for in a big way. According to her website, her short fiction has been nominated twice for Bram Stoker Awards, has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror and The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and has been published in several anthologies and magazines.

Rating:

It was a pretty damn good story. Once it got going, I was loathe to put it down until I found out who the “bad guy” was. Walters has a real knack for tension building, and a strong sense of the myriad ways that kids can get involved in situations that quickly spiral out of their control.

The aspect I liked the most about this book was the flashback scenes to Heather, Becca, Gia, and Rachel—I found the coming of age story compelling, especially for Heather and Becca. That part of childhood as a 12-year-old girl is so visceral—an almost obsession with your best friend, heartbreak when they seem to pick others over you, confusion about why you may be growing apart and what role you played, paranoia that your friends are talking about you when you're not there, and the general nastiness of girlfriends. The story's central "bogeyman" failed to deliver the same kind of terror for me as it did in the girls, but I found true horror lying between the layers of this girl group's friendship.

4.5 stars

Really glad I requested this one from Netgalley. It was really good. Kinda spooky and kept you guessing.

This should be marketed as a YA suspense novel, not in the horror genre.
I was disappointed because I was expecting an eerie, supernatural horror story and it was not. It started out suspensefully, then I grew not to trust the protagonist, she was hiding things from everyone, including herself, making one bad, impulsive decision after the other. I found it unbelievable that she actually had the kind of career she did, with her emotional baggage. Also, she never seemed to mature from her experience.
I found that by the middle of the book, I didn't care why anything happened and just read to finish it.
Oh also, the author's name, Damien Angelica - really? That would appeal to the YA audience, I suppose.

At first, I found myself constantly longing for the "THEN" chapters and kind of dreading the "NOW" chapters. Maybe that's because the main character grows into a neurotic, annoying mess. I understand the suspicious main character in a thriller kind of set up, but she was just too much for me at times. The planning to bump into people accidentally or showing up at their work to harass them was terrible. Also, her unjustified animosity toward her husband made me so frustrated with her. Leave him if you're that miserable! There's a moment where she drops food on the floor (it slips off the counter) and immediately blames him for having moved the toaster so there wasn't enough room for her to put down her takeout bags properly. This kind of person drives me absolutely insane. I couldn't stand her for so much of this book!

Despite that, I still really loved this story. And it's almost completely because of the "THEN" chapters (at least until the very end).

The Dead Girls Club bits were awesome, and the Red Lady stories were super creepy! So much so that I'd love to see this author lean harder into horror writing in the future!

I loved the friendship of the Dead Girls Club and the way the girls played around with things that scared them, but excited them. As a girl who grew up in that kind of suburbia, where sleepovers meant "light as a feather, stiff as a board" and camp-outs meant staying up telling ghost stories, I felt so much nostalgia for these moments and affection for these characters. Even when the girls fought, there was something so authentic about that teen girl experience in reading this book.

Things really started to come together for me in this story about 75% of the way through. That's when I started to appreciate what was going on with the "NOW" storyline and accept the main character, flaws and all.

Spoiler-y comments on the end of this book: What a terribly and deeply sad story. There were brief moments where I thought that the main character (and her mother) must be sociopathic monsters, but this is the kind of ending that really forces you to confront moral ambiguity or even accept that horrible things can happen and everyone can just move on. Life isn't fair. What happened to Becca wasn't fair. But it was also the kind of escape that a little girl, abused and alone and scared, could understandably think is a viable option. So many people are to blame for what ultimately leads to that little girl's death. I just felt a profound sense of sadness when thinking of any of these characters. Even if most of them are unlikable or "not good" people, there's still so much empathy to be had for each one of them.

I really liked this book. It wasn't perfect, and at times I despised the main character, but by the end I truly felt I'd read something that would stick with me (which isn't always common of this genre). I would definitely read more from this author in the future!

In 1991 Heather Cole and her friends Becca, Gia and Rachel formed the Dead Girls Club. They told stories about serial killers, and told ghost stories and other stories designed to scare each other. The worst one was The Red Lady. Becca became obsessed with her and was convinced that they could make her appear. Becca had a troubled childhood, and she thought that the Red Lady would make those problems go away with the right sacrifice. She enlists Heather's help and something terrible happens, something Heather can never recover from. Fast forward to present day: momentos from the past have started showing up and Heather is freaking out. Someone knows what happened all those many years ago, but that is impossible. The only 2 people there were Heather & Becca, and Heather is the only one who came out of that alive.
This book is told is in alternating sections between past and present. I felt like it was unrealistic that no one noticed the present day Heather devolving, especially as she was a Child Therapist and all that entails. The book had some good parts, but the present day especially was so unrealistic that it made it less enjoyable than it could have been.

Absolutely amazing. I have heard alot about this book and it was everything i heard it would be, if not better.

Once I got into this book I could not put it down! At first I was unsure because of the writing style which was kind of a stream of consciousness view. We spend the entire book in the head of the main character, Heather, both in the present and the past when she was a child. While I could forgive young Heather for her naiveté and her thoughtlessness, I did not feel the same when she was an adult. Grown-up Heather is pretty awful and I found her difficult to like. Right at the beginning she tells you she has murdered her best friend so I’m not sure I was supposed to like her.

The story drew me in and I just had to know what had happened to the girls and what was happening in the present. Although I was saddened by the past reveal I was not surprised. After all I was once a teen girl to and I know how hard it is to stand up for yourself when you just want to be liked. The reveal for adult Heather was a different story. Several red herrings and much misdirection later, I did not guess the identity of the harasser and it felt a little like it came out of nowhere but it made did make sense.

This book really gets the dynamics of friendship between teen girls correct in all its joy and all its ugliness. No one is more capable of cruelty than a pack of girls, both to themselves and to each other. The flashbacks sections felt very real and true to life. I was seriously creeped out at several points. I wouldn’t say this is horror but if urban legends like Bloody Mary and Slenderman frighten you then you really have to meet the Red Lady.

Thank you to Crooked Lane Books for providing an Electronic Advance Reader Copy via NetGalley for review.

The Dead Girls Club, by Damien Angelica Walters

Short Take: Have I mentioned that pre-teen girls are terrifying? Because THEY ARE.

(*Note: I received a copy of this book for review.*)

Happy Sunday my sweet nerdlings! I come to you from the depths of post-Halloween malaise and an unrelenting chocolate hangover. I don’t know about all of you, but I am not a fan of the “Halloween is over, bring on Christmas now now now!” thing that’s been taking over November for the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas, but I would kind of like to catch my breath and maybe have Thanksgiving in there somewhere?

So what I’m saying is that I’ve been working myself into a righteous funk and the only cure for that, as we all know, is a delicious book. So it tickles me right down to the giblets that The Dead Girls Club landed in my lap.

Heather Cole is a child psychologist, going about her usual daily routine, when she gets an unexpected delivery in the mail - half of a “Best Friends” necklace that was worn by Becca, Heather’s preteen BFF. But Heather hasn’t seen Becca since they were twelve, and never expected to hear from her either, because Heather killed Becca way back then.

(This is not a spoiler by the way, it’s revealed very early in the book. Feel free to complain about anything else I say however, I can be pretty irritating.)

From there, the story flips back and forth between present-day Heather, who keeps getting unwanted souvenirs of that last night with Becca, and almost-adolescent-Heather, who doesn’t quite grasp all the undercurrents in her friend’s life or why Becca is so obsessed with morbid stories. What starts as Becca, Heather, Rachel and Gia getting together to give themselves the giggly shivers talking about gruesome crimes becomes something much darker when Becca fixates on the story of the Red Lady, a woman killed for witchcraft whose vengeful spirit still works spells but always exacts a horrific price. As Becca’s obsession deepens, fear and friendship are the irresistible force and immovable object - pulling tighter together even as they destroy each other, leading up to that final, tragic night.

The Dead Girls Club is a fun, twisty, tightly-plotted exploration of a society-wide phenomenon that almost nobody talks about: we are all fixated on dead girls. If you look at some of the most sensational news-making cases, from JonBenet to Laci to Nicole, there’s usually a girl or young woman with a sunny smile at the heart of it. Look at our fascination with serial killers like Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy who gleefully destroy female bodies. And let’s not forget the cop procedural shows that almost always open with an artfully framed shot of a female corpse - manicured fingers tinted blue, a hint of thigh with a carefully centered scrape, full lips and perfect teeth being gently pulled open by gloved fingers to reveal a clue.

Even our undead, like the most recent incarnation of The Mummy or any and all vampire or werewolf movies that include the fairer sex make them WAY fairer - perfect bodies, skimpy clothes, long glossy hair, a kind of dark allure that signals seduction far more than terror.

So is it any wonder that young girls fixate on the morbid? Deep down, they internalize from a very early age that being a Dead Girl is something special. They’ll be forever beautiful and young and immortalized in a dozen different ways in the media, a weird form of celebrity. Never mind that everyone remembers the names of the killers but rarely the victims.

(There’s also a whole dissertation to be written on the idea that by venerating Dead Girls we’re conditioning young women to accept violence toward themselves as inevitable and even glamorous, but I just don’t have the intestinal fortitude to look too closely at that one this morning.)

Going back to the book (I swear I’m making some kind of point here), Becca’s single minded obsession with the Red Lady - victim-turned-victimizer - is beautifully, tragically, hauntingly perfect.. As the girls chant her name and their lives grow stranger, as Heather-of-today sees everything important in her life being threatened by the stalker who knows her darkest secret, well, let’s just say Vincent the cat is feeling somewhat neglected as I couldn’t focus on anything until I finished reading.

And oh duckies, the final twist left me speechless, for reasons that had nothing to do with the Milk Duds I was eating at the time. I’m not going to elaborate, but WOW.

I did have one complaint. I’m not sure if it would be considered a spoiler, so I’m just going to say that young girls are not always reliable narrators, and I found some of their story problematic. But overall, Ms. Walters delivered.

The Nerd’s Rating: FOUR HAPPY NEURONS (and some mini Twix bars, I need to get the rest of this Halloween candy out of here to make room for pumpkin pie!)

This group of four friends, obsessed with the macabre, is basically my friends and I in middle school. In 6th grade we formed a "detective squad" which then turned much darker than our original "who stole the money for the teachers gift?" case (spoiler, it was our friend C******, founding member of the club!)

ANYWAY, I absolutely loved them, the book setting is a few years older than me but not by much(I was born in 84, so the girls are just a bit older than I was when it takes place, which I really like)

I found this book to be very easy to read and I throughly enjoyed it. It’s about a women who receives an envelope containing her former best friend’s half of a bff necklace and things begin to spiral out of control. We then go back to when she was 12 and learn about the Dead Girls Club and slowly figure out what’s going on.

It is written in the first person from Heather’s perspective and goes from present day to “then”. I related to Heather completely from her anxious cuticle biting/picking to her unreasonable interpretations of things due to feeling like she was losing her mind but knowing something was really going on. Although there were a few times I was yelling at her like “really Heather are you that dumb” and then the author usually addressed this later on.

I highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys creepy thriller/horror type books. It is very suspenseful and for me, not predictable at all.

Someone had reviewed The Dead Girls Club as a "Goosebumps for Grown-ups." I dug that immediately. I love thrillers, and I focused on thrillers in the month of October, so I wanted to wait to read the ARC of The Dead Girls Club around Halloween. This book just didn't do it for me.

Becca and Heather and two other friends form "The Dead Girls Club" when they are 12 years old. Their obsession with The Red Lady has them experimenting with some rituals much like we all talked into mirrors at sleepovers saying "Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary." But something goes awry when the girls take it too far.

Fast forward to their 30s, and Heather is forced to re-live what happened that summer when she was 12. She begins to obsess over the details of the summer, and her obsession begins to take over her life and her career.

Sounds interesting enough, but it reads like every commercial thriller. The twist wasn't enough; Heather drove me crazy, the writing was sub-par, and the story was too repetitive. Maybe I just read too many really GOOD thrillers this last month for this one to be anything but ok--even less than ok. The title and the cover drew me in--I think the story had some promise. It just didn't work for me.

The story is told from the viewpoint of Heather, a child psychologist, who is the last person I would ever want to be treating my child or any child. Heather has a secret that she has repressed for thirty years and when she receives half of a friendship necklace in the mail, she knows her past has caught up to her. When she was twelve, she performed a ritual with her best friend, Becca, which left Becca dead and Heather not remembering how she got rid of the body.

Becca's mom went to prison for the murder and until now, Heather thought no one knew her role in Becca's death. With the appearance of Becca's half of the necklace she knows someone is telling her they know what she did. Heather's fragile world and psyche come crashing down as Heather tries to figure out who is targeting her and her past.

This isn't really a horror story unless you are an impressionable twelve year old with an very active imagination. In the THEN portions of the book, Becca, Heather, and two other girls like to tell each other very scary stories and Becca claims the stories she tells about the Red Lady are true. The other two girls believe Becca's claims but Heather is sure that Becca is making up the stories about the Red Lady. Eventually Becca goads Heather into proving that she believes the Red Lady is real, with disastrous consequences.

The NOW portions of the book consist of a hysterically paranoid Heather neglecting her patients. She doesn't even take notes during sessions because she totally zones out the children she is treating, IF she even shows up for appointments. Heather also proceeds to destroy friendships and her marriage as she won't tell anyone why she is going totally off the rails. Everybody is a potential enemy to her and it feels to me that Heather must have been stuck at her twelve year old emotional level even now as a forty year old woman.

The author does a great job of portraying a desperate woman who is out of her mind frantic but Heather is such an unlikeable character that it's hard to have any sympathy for her plight. Instead I was feeling sorry for all the people in her current life. I did want to get to the end of the book to find out who did what and when and why but if I'd had my way, Heather would be on some really strong chill pills while I read the story.

Thank you to Crooked Lane Books and NetGalley for this ARC.

3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

THE DEAD GIRLS CLUB is an intriguing book about a group of childhood friends, an increasingly dark story about a haunting ghost known as The Red Lady, and a past that haunts one of the friends in adulthood.

Heather and Becca, along with their two friends Rachel and Gia, are the members of their self-named Dead Girls Club due to their obsession with serial killers, ghosts, and horror stories. In addition to normal adolescent angst that they experience, things intensify when Becca starts telling the group about The Red Lady, a ghost whose human life came to a tragic and violent end.

Years later, Heather is a child psychologist and happily married, but finds her life turning upside down when an anonymous person sends her Rachel's locket from when they were children. It's a locket that Heather hasn't seen in years, not since since she killed Rachel when they were kids.

Author Damien Angelica Walters does a great job fleshing out the characters and creating tense moments of suspense. I was initially a bit put off with all of the talk of "supernatural" in the other reviews, but I felt that the element ultimately worked well in building the suspense and tying the story together. I would classify this as a mystery. I was engaged in the characters and their interactions with each other, and reactions to each other. I was hooked from the beginning pages until the end.

Thank you to Damien Angelica Walters, Crooked Lane Books, and NetGalley for an ARC.