Finished a short story for an anthology yesterday morning, and Mary needed a break from the story she’s working on, so we took ourselves to the Chinese buffet and then to the matinee to see Godzilla Minus Zero. We had the entire theater to ourselves.
The movie is fantastic. We both really enjoyed it. My full review can be found here.
Afterward, we visited with my grandmother, who turns 101 on Friday and is very angry about it. She’s not asking me to smother her with a pillow or anything, but she peppers conversation with how much she doesn’t want to be here and tells us how she goes to bed every night hoping to not wake up in the morning.
None of this makes for delightful conversation or a pleasant visit.
My parents, my sister, her husband, and their dog are visiting this coming weekend. This will be our first visitors since moving. I’d hoped to be fully unpacked before that happened, but I reckon that was a pipe dream. Current estimates have us being fully unpacked sometime around the year 2030.
And no, we still haven’t found that missing box of Stephen Graham Jones, Laurel Hightower, and Stephen King books, and I’m still sick about it.
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A reminder that you can find a complete alphabetized Women in Horror Year index here.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 142
Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison
Every wedding guest’s worst nightmare is on repeat in this wild and twisty new horror novel from the New York Times bestselling author of So Thirsty and Play Nice.
It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend: The venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air—and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends’ finally having the big wedding they’ve always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seen her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not.
Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question whether it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or else suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.
If you’ve never read Rachel Harrison, and you formed an opinion based solely on the book’s cover, you might be forgiven for assuming Kiss Slay Replay is a spicy dark romance. And I would feel bad for you, were that the case, because this is a wildly entertaining balls-to-the-wall horror novel — think Groundhog Day meets My Bloody Valentine. Or, for my younger readers who might not get half of that reference, it’s Scream meets that episode of Family Guy where Peter and Brian go back to the 1980s and have to relive it over and over again.
It’s clever, witty, and has enough violence and gore to satisfy even the most jaded horror reader. Don’t get me wrong. it’s not extreme horror. But given the writing style and the obsidian humor, it’s almost Splatterpunk. And indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up on the Splatterpunk Awards ballot next year, because I suspect this book will really strike a chord with Gen Z and Millennial fans of that subgenre. It may very well indeed be the first Splatterpunk Romantic Comedy.
Rachel gets stronger and stronger as a writer with each subsequent novel, and she is in full command of her talents here. It is a ridiculously fun read, and I suspect it was just as much fun to write. I don’t know if it has been optioned yet, or if it’s in development for television or film, but it absolutely fucking should be. There’s massive mainstream crossover potential here, in the right hands. This book has a massive amount of heart, a protagonist you want to root for with every fiber of your being, and sharp prose that moves lightning fast. Highly recommended.
Kiss Slay Replay is available in hardcover, eBook and audiobook from Berkley.
