First published 2021
Jade Daniels sits in her Proofrock classroom, one failed assignment away from dropping out. The half-Indian teenager pours everything into her final project about horror films while her town pretends she doesn't exist. Her father beats her. Her mother vanished. But Jade knows movies, especially the scary ones. Blood starts appearing in Indian Lake. Stories the town buried years ago claw back to the surface. Missing tourists. A drowned church. Deaths at the old camp. Jade watches it all through the lens of her encyclopedic horror knowledge, and the patterns start clicking into place. Then Letha Mondragon arrives. Jade recognizes her immediately as the Final Girl, the one who survives when everyone else dies. The sequence has begun, just like in the movies. Proofrock wants to silence Jade, trap her, make her disappear like so many others. But she keeps digging into the town's bloody history. She fights back. Even outcasts love fiercely and refuse to surrender.
Genres: mystery, horror, contemporary, thriller
Vibes: dark, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Proofrock, Indian Lake
Period: contemporary
448 pages · Paperback · Titan Books
Content warnings: abuse, mental-illness, violence