Grady Hendrix in 2020

I’ve read four books by Grady Hendrix over the past several years. I’m finishing the fourth one tonight, and I think I’m taking a permanent hiatus from his fiction after this.

They always sound like things I’ll enjoy. Horrorstor is about employees who get locked in an Ikea-type store overnight, and horror commences. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Killing Vampires is exactly what the title says - a book club is seduced by a vampire, and eventual horror commences. The Final Girl Support Group was my favorite, about a group of final girls who dealt with their trauma in various ways including group therapy - until someone starts killing them. (Horror commences, of course.) And the one I’m finishing is My Best Friend’s Exorcism - teenage girls in 1988 dealing with one of them being possessed, and, you guessed it, horror.

But they always get darker than I’m expecting. Relationships are destroyed, all hope is truly lost, it just ceases to be fun after a while even if the ending is not always awful. They’re just…exhausting. I keep getting tricked into picking up one more, thinking this time it might be different - and The Final Girl Support Group almost was, which is why I picked up Exorcism so soon after finishing that one. But this one is probably the worst, and I’m emotionally wrecked. I need to know how it ends, and then I’m calling it. I’m done with Grady Hendrix. He’s a great write, just not for me.

Also, the possessed girl kills her dog in this book, and I just CANNOT with that. It’s offscreen, but still not okay.