Teenagers and horror. They seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly, don’t they? It’s hard to pinpoint where this started. As far back as the 1950s, films such as I was a Teenage Werewolf and I was a Teenage Frankenstein started appearing in cineplexes across America, the genre likely hitting its “golden age” in the 70s and 80s with films such as Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th. As a writer and an educator, I am always interested as to why certain tropes and motifs catch on and what they’re saying about the culture that is producing them. Maybe as adults, we’re trying to tell our teens that from here on out, life is going to be nothing but horror or perhaps we’re recalling our own horrific teenage years and are trying to reassure them that they too can get through them. It also could be as simple as people read these books and see these movies, so they keep making more.
Josh Malerman’s Daphne, originally published in 2022, is a short, tight, genuinely spooky, and at times gruesome horror novel that reads like an homage to some of those aforementioned teen slasher franchises along with a few others. Set in the fictional town of Samhattan (a name so cool I wish I thought it up), it follows the girl’s basketball team who find themselves being hunted down by what seems to be local urban legend come to life Daphne, a story one of the girls tells the others at a sleepover prior to the “big game” that opens the book. Said friend seemed to forget the part of that legend where you weren’t supposed to talk about Daphne, not even think about her, because once you do, it brings her back (a la Candyman). Turns out Daphne is the vengeful spirit out to get the town back after the kids of her generation, now the parents of said basketball players did something that royally pissed her off when they were teens (a la Freddy). Don’t take the a las as criticisms. Horror and genre fiction in general is often at its best when it’s self-referential and these comparisons, whether intentional or subconscious, are likely pure homage.
The story’s main protagonist is Kit Lamb, the girl who makes the winning shot after asking the rim a question (which I didn’t know was a thing – is it? I have yet to Google it), “Will Daphne kill me?” Kit herself suffers severe anxiety, and her journal entries are interspersed throughout the book, which at times slows down what I thought was a pretty fast-moving narrative. Another criticism would be that at times it's hard to tell the girls apart when their chapters come along. Also, our police character, Detective McGowan, is pretty stiff and dry. Like a lot of writers, Malerman doesn’t write cops very well, which is a good thing, it probably means he’s mostly stayed out of trouble in life, but at times the tough, determined, lady detective comes off as very wooden, almost like an archetype out of some 60s cop show.
The sequences with Daphne herself are well-written and scary while the unavoidable Final Boss Battle with her left me feeling a little let down,
is a quick, fun, spooky read for fans of the genre. Teenager or otherwise.
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