Title: The Dead Girls Club
Author: Damien Angelica Walters
Release Date: December 10, 2019
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Rating: 5 Stars
Damien Angelica Walters is one of my favorite literary horror writers. In her latest book, The Dead Girls Club, Walters veers a bit more toward a standard horror thriller without losing the brilliant turns of a phrase and human insight that makes her writing such a pleasure to read.
In her most mainstream work to date, Walters puts her unique spin on a few common horror tropes. Most notably, the “someone knows about an awful thing I did in the past” and “children play around with an urban legend” tropes. Thankfully, Walters is able to infuse both of these tropes with enough new energy that they still feel fresh and relevant.
Walters always mentions scars in her work, often as a physical representation of emotional turmoil. In this book, there’s not much of an emphasis placed on physical scars, but there are plenty of psychological scars to take their place.
The pacing of this book reminded me of Bird Box by Josh Malerman, and the comparisons to A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay are apt as well. Paper Tigers is still my favorite of Walters’ books, but The Dead Girls Club is also a 5-star, must-read for fans of the horror and thriller genres. It has plenty of tense, unnerving moments and a resolution that left me completely satisfied.
Thank you to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for providing an ARC. This review contains my honest, unbiased opinion.
April A. Taylor 