REVIEW: Good Girls Don't Die by Christina Henry

One day Celia wakes up in a house that isn’t hers with a husband she doesn’t recognise and a little girl she’s never seen before who claims to be her daughter. She tries to remember who she was before because she is certain that this life – the little family-run restaurant she owns in a gossipy small town, and a feud with a neighbour who ends up dead – is not hers.

Allie and her friends travel to a remote cabin in the woods for the weekend. The cabin looks recently assembled and there are no animals or other life anywhere in the forest. Nothing about the place seems right and then in the middle of the night a stranger is banging on the cabin door…

Maggie, along with twelve other women, wakes up in a shipping container with the number three stamped on the back of her T-shirt. If she wants to see her daughter Paige again, Maggie must complete The Maze – a deadly high-stakes obstacle course.

"Maybe everything felt like a thriller when you were trapped inside it."

Christina Henry is back with another wonderfully weird and delightfully dark story of horror and mystery. I fell in love with Henry for her twisted reimagining's, and so I was so excited to see her take on the idea of The Final Girl. We find ourselves following three women all living in a seemingly fictional world created just for their terror and tailor made to destroy them in a delightfully dark survival tale.

Each women tells their story one at time in three short stories before we move on— the first switch was a little jarring to leave behind but it very quickly found a flow and kept a quick, energetic pace that swept me up and dragged me along for the ride. Moving from a quiet unease to full on fearing for their lives, each world was different but had its own personal brand of fear. It was full of mystery and intrigue, with descriptive visuals and chilling scenes that make your hairs stand on end. Each individual story was a weaving, complex web that was so satisfying to unravel - although there’s some quite big clues as to what is happening, the why and the how are dangled like bait and it was intensely suffocating. And as for our leading ladies, our final girls - I was absolutely obsessed with them, their sense of sisterhood and their badass will to survive.

Small town murder mystery meets Slasher B-movie meets survival horror with a genre-blending narrative and masterful storytelling; just in time for your Halloween reading.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Good Girls Don't Die is available from November 21st with Titan Books. I received an advanced reviewers copy of this title.

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