Her mother may have named her Cordelia, but everyone knows her as Red, and her whole life she's been a bit of a misfit in the family.
When the first rumors of sickness reached the news, her mother, father, and brother dismissed it as a passing problem, but Red - always
one to think ahead and consider worst-case scenarios, always reading scary stories and watching horror movies - took it deadly
serious... so, when the Crisis hit full-force, she alone was anything like ready as civilization crumbled. Like the disease behind the
pandemic itself, it may have started with an innocuous dry cough, but it ended in death for almost everyone, save those mysteriously
immune.
Red's plan was for the family to set out on foot (because roads meant roadblocks and traffic jams) to head to Grandma's cabin in the
woods. It's far enough from cities to be reasonably safe from infection and looters and the militias that rose in the power vacuum (not
to mention the actual military, intent on rounding everyone up "for their own good" to be taken who knew where, to Red's suspicion),
and is fairly self-sufficient to ride out the Crisis as long as possible. It won't be an easy hike, with Red's prosthetic leg and her
mother's idea of a hike being walking across the college campus where she works to get a latte, but it seems like their best option. But
one thing movies got right about plans in horror situations is that they never go right. Now it's just Red alone, struggling to survive
long enough to reach Grandma's house, in a world full of a sickness that's taken a far deadlier turn than imagined and all-too-human
wolves.
Review
The Girl in Red, a dark story of apocalyptic survival, has obvious homages to the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood", but
also draws on other horror stories and movies, particularly how a girl steeped in such tales tries to avoid becoming a cliché
victim by doing the stupid thing - which looks so easy when one is sitting in the living room shouting at a character on a screen not
to leave the essential item behind because they'll need it later, but much harder to do when it's reality writing the script. Red is a
survivor and fighter from the start, but has to learn when to listen to her instincts and when she's spiraling into paranoia (not
entirely unjustified, as things go from bad to worse to even worse than her own worst-case scenarios - which, given her love for horror
movies, is very bad indeed). The story moves between her time as a solo traveler and what happened to her family, a tragedy that slowly
unfolds in dark parallel to her current circumstances. If this is a fairy tale, it's definitely not the sanitized version many might be
familiar with; I didn't label it "horror" for no reason (even though it doesn't seem to be categorized that way on Amazon). It starts
moving quickly and keeps moving to the end, with Red discovering just how far she's willing to go to survive against the "wolves" of
this new world. I had a few quibbles with a plot turn or two that ended up feeling like distractions or red herrings, and something
about it feels like it should have a sequel or companion volume, but overall it's a solid, gutsy story that only rarely pulls its
punches.
Celia has no memory of her life before she found herself standing in a suburban kitchen, with a young girl (a daughter?) demanding
lunch and a husband on his way to work. Nothing about her home, her family, or her job - owner of a small-town family Italian
restaurant - rings a bell, either, but whenever she tries too hard to remember, she gets a splitting headache. There's also something
very strange about the town and the people, almost like they're reciting lines from a cozy mystery story rather than talking as normal
people talk. When she finds the body of an irascible neighbor in the dumpster and the local police consider her a prime suspect, her
amnesia becomes the least of her worries...
Allie's twenty-first birthday was supposed to be spent at the beach with her best friends Cam and Madison - until Brad, Cam's
controlling boyfriend, invited himself and his friend Steve (also Madison's beau) along and unilaterally changed their destination to
a remote cabin deep in the woods. It's just like something out of the slasher movies Allie loves to watch... until strange noises in
the middle of the night make the slasher comparison all too real...
Maggie doesn't remember what happened after she fell asleep last night, but she wakes up dressed in a strange, numbered uniform with
nine other similarly-disoriented women. A uniformed man informs them that they each have had a loved one abducted - Maggie is shown a
brief video of her own terrified daughter as proof - and that, if they fail to complete a maze and series of challenges in time,
those loved ones will be executed. Refusal to participate brings swift and lethal repercussions. She always used to think she'd be a
solid survivor in the young adult dystopian tales she reads, but soon learn that words on a page are a far cry from living the
nightmare...
Three women, three impossible situations, three story genres seemingly sprung to life around them - and, unbeknownst to any of them,
one common enemy who means to see none of them walk away.
Review
I've previous read and quite enjoyed another story by Christina Henry (The Girl in Red, an apocalypse-tinged riff on
"Little Red Riding Hood"), and was looking for a seasonally appropriate read, so when this popped up on Libby I figured it was worth
a shot. While the premise is interesting, it all gets drug down in the ratings by an ending that lingers too long and hammers home
its point too hard, long past effectiveness.
Starting with Celia, the book tells each woman's story as their ordinary lives quickly dissolve into scenarios straight from a horror
movie. The situations and protagonists are different enough to avoid straight-up repetition, though it's clear early on that there
are similarities throughout. Even as they realize how things don't quite add up, a slow accumulation of details and discrepancies
that seem more like staging than reality, they have no choice but to live through the terrible things happening to and around them
even as they try to put the bigger puzzle pieces together. While none of them turn out to be the superstar heroines of their favored
genres they imagined they'd become, they all find ways to step up to the plate and match wits with their apparent captors. Hints of
what's really going on come from between-chapter snippets of online chat rooms and conversations between genre fans, conversations
that are intruded upon by toxic trolls and take ugly turns.
On their own, the three tales almost work like a themed short story collection. Maybe Good Girls Don't Die would've been
better served by being just that, leaving more mystery over how they each ended up in their surreal, borderline preternaturally
nightmarish situations. But, skirting spoiler territory, what happens after they figure out the gist of what's going on and the
three threads come together becomes an overlong slog, reducing their common enemy/enemies to caricature levels that sell short the
central themes of misogyny and toxic masculinity turning the lives of girls and women into everyday horror tales, too often turning
us against each other. (I would've thought the baddies were too over-the-top, but recent current events and political campaigns
unfortunately show how many people apparently embrace that level of extreme, violent contempt for anyone without a particular set
of genitalia.) Given what they had to go through to get to that point in the story, the things they had to do and who they had to
become, that final bit should not have taken nearly so long to drag out to the conclusion. As a reader, I more than got Henry's
point long, long before the book ended.
