Why You'll Love This
It's a horror novel about demonic possession that will make you nostalgic for your middle school best friend — and that combination shouldn't work, but it absolutely does.
- Great if you want: 80s nostalgia weaponized inside a genuinely unsettling horror story
- The experience: funny and heartfelt until it isn't — then surprisingly creepy
- The writing: Hendrix structures each chapter like a mixtape side, using period detail as emotional shorthand
- Skip if: body horror and graphic demon behavior is a hard no for you
About This Book
The bonds of teenage friendship can survive almost anything — bad haircuts, crushing embarrassments, the brutal social sorting of high school. But what happens when your best friend comes back from a night in the woods fundamentally, irreversibly wrong? That's the question at the heart of Grady Hendrix's novel, which takes the horror of demonic possession and reframes it as something even more terrifying: the fear of losing the person who knows you best. Abby's refusal to abandon Gretchen is equal parts heroic and heartbreaking, and it gives the book an emotional spine that most horror novels never bother to build.
Hendrix structures the story as an unabashed love letter to 1988 — each chapter arrives with a period-accurate pop song title, and the decade's textures (the fashion, the music, the cultural anxieties) are rendered with genuine affection rather than cheap nostalgia. The prose moves fast, the humor is sharp enough to cut, and Hendrix understands that real dread grows best in familiar places. This is a book that earns its scares precisely because it earns its friendship first.