The Dead Girls Club, by Damien Angelica Waters, is a supernatural thriller that hits shelves December 10th, 2019. The Dead Girls Club follows Heather, who kicks things off the story by receiving a mysterious envelope which contains one half of one of those super-popular-in-the-90s “best friends forever” broken heart necklaces. The problem is, it’s her best friend’s half, and the last time Heather saw it was the day she killed her BFF back when they were twelve.
We then spend the rest of the book along for the ride as she gets more and more mysterious clues sent to her and dissolves into more and more of a panic trying to figure out who knows her secrets and why they’re coming after her now. We also intermittently flash back to her childhood to unravel the mystery of how and why she ended up killing her own best friend, getting a closer look at our titular friend group nicknamed “The Dead Girls Club”—AKA a group of preteens obsessed with serial killers, murders, and ghost stories.
So, the usual.
I requested this book on NetGalley (so thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a copy! However, please note that all opinions are still my own and I’m going to be 100% honest with you) and two things really caught my attention and drew me to this title: the overall synopsis, of course, and more notably because it was billed as being similar to A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay. To which I have just one thing to say:
NAH.
Nah, girl. Not at all. It seems like publishing companies these days are always overselling things with these bold-faced lies in the form of “comparisons”. (Like every YA fantasy is the “new Harry Potter”, amiright?)
Sure it is.
I absolutely loved A Head Full of Ghosts and thought it was really well written, unique, and interesting. I felt…differently about this The Dead Girls Club.
My overall feelings about this book were kind of just…meh. Very middle of the road. It had some cons, it had a couple pros, and nothing really tipped it in either direction for me. The plot is nothing really groundbreaking. It’s a concept we’ve seen plenty of times before in everything from cheesy Lifetime movies to Pretty Little Liars to I Know What You Did Last Summer. (In fact, with the group of four female friends, one dead girl, and the past mysteriously creeping back up, I actually got some major PLL vibes from this, but maybe that’s just me. In the early days of that show, my best friend and I would have weekly “TV dates” to watch the new episodes and scream about how they didn’t make any sense, so it could just be stuck in my head.)
I started off on the wrong foot with this book, because I really didn’t like the writing at the beginning. We kick things off quickly with Heather getting the envelope containing Becca’s necklace (Becca being the dead best friend) right away, but then things progress so quickly that it doesn’t really have a natural, readable flow and takes on more of an “and then, and then, and then” quality. Then I went home, then I made dinner, then I showered, then I went to bed. IT was really clunky and I didn’t enjoy the writing at all for the first few chapters. This is a little snippet of the MC/narrator talking about her husband:
“…Our first date. A coffee shop. Him with an espresso, me with a latte. Almond biscotti and blueberry scones. Knuckles brushing together. Knees nudging under the table. Ten minutes in, wanting a second date. Hoping he did, too.”
Gah. I just don’t like it. It all felt rushed and felt like the author just wanted to really quickly dump a lot of obligatory background info on me and then move on, instead of working things into the story more naturally as we went or actually just building up this character and her life. Like, “Yeah, yeah, here’s some background, who cares what this character’s life is like, all I really want to talk about is murder.”
Also—and I’ll warn you, this is probably nitpicky—but she also overuses a writing convention which is one of my pet peeves, and that’s when people describe people or things by saying “all” and then making a list of a couple of random qualities. Like these two examples from the book:
“All long hair, cleft chin, and lean muscles.”
“All dirty blonde hair, narrow hips, and American Eagle jeans.”
I don’t know, something about this particular turn of phrase just bugs the ever living hell out of me. Maybe it’s because the use of “all” implies that the three things you just listed are the three things you think are significant about this character—hair, hips, jeans. That is all they are reduced to. Or maybe it comes across as lazy. Either way, I’ve always thought that if you’re going to use this in your writing, you should use it once; but this author used it over and over again (more than just the two noted here) and just…meh. I got really tired of it.
Another thing that bothered me was Heather’s job and how it was represented. She’s supposed to be a child psychologist, but the way it’s written is more like a very basic shell of what it sort of seems like a child psychologist might do. Since she seems to spend most of her time at work screwing around and researching people from her past in an attempt to catch whoever is harassing her, the only sessions we see—other than a group session where Heather is so bad at her job that she tunes out while one girl beats the shit out of another one—are these brief glimpses of sessions with a little girl named Cassidy, who talks about her life in terms of “princess stories”, and the whole thing just seems so stereotypical and generic. Heather only achieves basically tuning the girl out (this seems to be a pattern), slamming drawers loudly enough to startle a child who clearly already has some major trauma, and then sending her to the corner to color. It didn’t make Heather any more likable or relatable as a character (at some points I wondered if the author was even doing the whole Girl on the Train/Gone Girl unlikable main character schtick, but it wasn’t done well enough for me to be able to tell if it she was intentionally unlikable or somewhat lazy writing just made her seem that way) and it felt more like filler than anything.
The only other purpose it served was to have the same little girl find a drawing from Heather’s childhood which had been anonymously mailed to her by her torturer. (Which she found when Heather literally left the session to get some notes on a totally different patient from her receptionist, after actually taking a call during the appointment, as well. So professional. Can someone get this little girl a new therapist, please?) After finding the drawing, Cassidy makes some comments on it which are supposedly so enlightening for Heather and serve to illustrate how kids think so much differently than adults about “monsters” or things coming to get us—but it still just kind of feels like a cheap shot to further Heather’s mystery and not really build character or her world by showing us what she does for a living. The whole thing only resulted in freaking the little girl out even more, in the midst of her therapist TOTALLY NOT LISTENING TO HER about how she is clearly being abused by her stepfather.
Okay, I need to chill.
The good news is, the book does redeem itself once we get more into the meat of it—the murder of her best friend, the bad things that happened when they were kids, their ghost stories they used to tell, Heather trying to hunt down who is sending her the items from her past. Once we get into it, that quick pacing actually starts working well for it and we get to move along through the story and try to solve the mystery along with Heather. I thought it was a pretty interesting story about the girls when they were young, kind of bringing to the page the vibe of modern day news stories where kids stab their friends in the name of Slenderman (a case which Heather actually references more than once) or something else fictional. It also brings to mind the debate about the power of the human mind and manifestation—whether we really do possess the power to think things into being, and if we believe them enough, are they real?
Additionally, there are some very real, very heart wrenching portrayals of how mean young girls can be to one another, which successfully ratchet up the tension and actually make you feel for the young versions of the characters (I liked kid Heather a lot better than adult Heather).
There were also a few really adrenaline-heightening moments as Heather sneaks around playing detective, like when she breaks into a friend’s office and gets busted by the receptionist, or when she’s confronted by the head of a Neighborhood Watch program while she’s creeping around a suburb. These moments largely come from Heather just doing reckless and dumb things, but there were certainly a few moments where I was thinking, well now what are you going to do? So it is some what interesting to follow as she tries—often unsuccessfully—to sort things out on her own without the help of law enforcement.
I didn’t love the ending, but it also didn’t quite go where I thought it was going, so I guess I have to give it that. I just didn’t think it was that great of an ending. Once again, just kind of meh.
Rating wise, I’d give this 2 ½ or 3 stars. Probably 2 ½ because it would be right in the middle of the road which is all too accurate to how I felt about this. Again, I didn’t dislike it. I just didn’t like it all that much. I found it kind of enjoyable, sort of something to pass the time, but also kind of forgettable. It would make a quick read if you’re just looking for something murder-y to kill time with. By no means do I think it warrants the comparison to A Head Full of Ghosts, and isn’t nearly as successful at blurring the lines between the supernatural and the thriller elements. The fact that there’s a ghost story involved with both and it alternates between adult versions and childhood versions of the main characters are really the only things the two have in common, in my opinion. Writing-wise, they are by no means equivalent.
But this book releases on December 10th, so if you want something to breeze through and pass the time while you’re snowed in and you feel like solving a sort of cheesy, Lifetime-movie-esque mystery, then it may be worth checking out. Or pick it up as a holiday gift for your murder mystery loving aunt who needs to break out of her James Patterson/Lee Child/Dean Koontz shell. Perhaps you’ll find it much less meh than I did. I definitely think fans of Pretty Little Liars or similar franchises would find this right up their alley!
What did everyone else think? Did you read this yet? Do you plan to? Let me know in the comments! As always, I’d love to hear from you. <3