Good Girls Don't Die (Christina Henry)

Good Girls Don't Die
Christina Henry
Berkley
Fiction, Thriller
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Celia has no memory of her life before she found herself standing in a suburban kitchen, with a young girl (a daughter?) demanding lunch and a husband on his way to work. Nothing about her home, her family, or her job - owner of a small-town family Italian restaurant - rings a bell, either, but whenever she tries too hard to remember, she gets a splitting headache. There's also something very strange about the town and the people, almost like they're reciting lines from a cozy mystery story rather than talking as normal people talk. When she finds the body of an irascible neighbor in the dumpster and the local police consider her a prime suspect, her amnesia becomes the least of her worries...
Allie's twenty-first birthday was supposed to be spent at the beach with her best friends Cam and Madison - until Brad, Cam's controlling boyfriend, invited himself and his friend Steve (also Madison's beau) along and unilaterally changed their destination to a remote cabin deep in the woods. It's just like something out of the slasher movies Allie loves to watch... until strange noises in the middle of the night make the slasher comparison all too real...
Maggie doesn't remember what happened after she fell asleep last night, but she wakes up dressed in a strange, numbered uniform with nine other similarly-disoriented women. A uniformed man informs them that they each have had a loved one abducted - Maggie is shown a brief video of her own terrified daughter as proof - and that, if they fail to complete a maze and series of challenges in time, those loved ones will be executed. Refusal to participate brings swift and lethal repercussions. She always used to think she'd be a solid survivor in the young adult dystopian tales she reads, but soon learn that words on a page are a far cry from living the nightmare...
Three women, three impossible situations, three story genres seemingly sprung to life around them - and, unbeknownst to any of them, one common enemy who means to see none of them walk away.

REVIEW: I've previous read and quite enjoyed another story by Christina Henry (The Girl in Red, an apocalypse-tinged riff on "Little Red Riding Hood"), and was looking for a seasonally appropriate read, so when this popped up on Libby I figured it was worth a shot. While the premise is interesting, it all gets drug down in the ratings by an ending that lingers too long and hammers home its point too hard, long past effectiveness.
Starting with Celia, the story tells each woman's story as their ordinary lives quickly dissolve into scenarios straight from a horror movie. The situations and protagonists are different enough to avoid straight-up repetition, though it's clear early on that there are similarities throughout. Even as they realize how things don't quite add up, a slow accumulation of details and discrepancies that seem more like staging than reality, they have no choice but to live through the terrible things happening to and around them even as they try to put the bigger puzzle pieces together. While none of them turn out to be the superstar heroines of their favored genres they imagined they'd become, they all find ways to step up to the plate and match wits with their apparent captors. Hints of what's really going on come from between-chapter snippets of online chat rooms and conversations between genre fans, conversations that are intruded upon by toxic trolls and take ugly turns.
On their own, the three tales almost work like a themed short story collection. Maybe Good Girls Don't Die would've been better served by being just that, leaving more mystery over how they each ended up in their surreal, borderline preternaturally nightmarish situations. But, skirting spoiler territory, what happens after they figure out the gist of what's going on and the three threads come together becomes an overlong slog, reducing their common enemy/enemies to caricature levels that sell short the central themes of misogyny and toxic masculinity turning the lives of girls and women into everyday horror tales, too often turning us against each other. (I would've thought the baddies were too over-the-top, but recent current events and political campaigns unfortunately show how many people apparently embrace that level of extreme, violent contempt for anyone without a particular set of genitalia.) Given what they had to go through to get to that point in the story, the things they had to do and who they had to become, that final bit should not have taken nearly so long to drag out to the conclusion. As a reader, I more than got Henry's point long, long before the book ended.

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