My Best Friend’s Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

Overall: I really enjoyed The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, so when I started seeing My Best Friend’s Exorcism everywhere, I knew I would be reading it in time for Halloween. The cover! I know I don’t often talk about covers, but this one is amazing. It’s a creepy time warp to my childhood. Hendrix describes the plot as a mashup of Beaches and The Exorcist, but to my mind it was more Heathers and The Exorcist. Abby, a working-class girl all too aware of her scholarship student status, and Gretchen, whose wealthy but repressed family might be straight from The Stepford Wives, attend an elite private high school in the 1980s in Charleston, SC. After a strange night involving LSD, a sleepover, and being lost in the woods, Gretchen starts acting strange, and things start to go horribly wrong.

Likes: I’m not going to speculate about how Grady Hendrix can perfectly capture the voice of a teenage girl, or the tensions in an all-girl friend group, but he can, and he puts it all there on the page. Abby, Gretchen, jock Margaret, and pious, perfectionist Glee, support each other, hate each other, laugh with each other, and subtly undermine each other. The 80s nostalgia factor is turned up to 11, with references to bands, fashion trends, and cars. If you are a Stranger Things or Archive 81 fan, you might enjoy this one!

Dislikes: Something bad happens to Good Dog Max at the end of the book. I’m not sure what, because I skipped over that part. I truly can’t stand violence towards animals, but at least this was only one instance and was easy to skip. The exorcism scene dragged a little bit for me.

General note: this book has characters who are white, cisgender, and heterosexual (or at least present themselves as heterosexual). Period. There are also many instances of homophobia and racism throughout the book, including a reference to blackface. While these were common in the 80s, they are difficult to read about today. The horror in this book isn’t just the blood-and-guts variety.

FYI: Disordered eating, inappropriate relationship between a powerful adult and a teen girl, homophobia, attempted suicide, demonic possession, violence towards an animal, animal death, kidnapping, imprisonment, drug use, gaslighting, blood, and general gore.