"This game used to be candy. A sugary addictive treat. Now there was only the sour aftertaste and the seeping knowledge of just how bad for you it was. The excitement that had eclipsed everything before was eroding, eaten away by what we were doing."
Rachel Chavez, narrator of Goldy Moldavsky's The Mary Shelley Club, had been home alone that night. She'd heard footsteps downstairs. It was two masked men. One ran away.
The other didn't.
A year later Rachel and her mom have moved to give her a fresh start. She's going to--you guessed it--a private school for super rich kids. She's pretty inconspicuous until she manages to piss off an elite mean girl, Lux, at a party in an abandoned house, going from unknown to pariah.
Now Rachel is a huge horror movie fan. At a showing of Evil Dead II she meets Freddie who inadvertently tips her off to a group of pranksters in the school. It turns out that he's a member of the ultra secret Mary Shelley Club. They watch horror movies and play games--ones that turn ordinary life events into revenge ops. The members take turns planning and orchestrating.
Rachel finds participating in her first game--one in which a bully is humiliated--exhilarating and affirming.
"If I was a monster, then so was everyone else in this club. And for once I didn't feel like such a freak.
We could be monsters together."
But then someone is seriously hurt in one game. And the next turns deadly.
If you enjoy twisty chillers built around the evil that can lurk in the human heart and soul you owe it to yourself to read The Mary Shelley Club.
On a purrrsonal note, it's Christmas Eve morning. The snow ❄️ is coming down. Eugene is out plowing. I'm praying that the white stuff will stop in time for it to be safe for my kids to drive up. Without them it just wouldn't feel feel like Christmas.
A great big shout out goes out to Eugene and all the other blizzard battlers.
Jules Hathaway
Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone
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