The Girl in Red (Christina Henry)

The Girl in Red
Christina Henry
Berkley
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Her mother may have named her Cordelia, but everyone knows her as Red, and her whole life she's been a bit of a misfit in the family. When the first rumors of sickness reached the news, her mother, father, and brother dismissed it as a passing problem, but Red - always one to think ahead and consider worst-case scenarios, always reading scary stories and watching horror movies - took it deadly serious... so, when the Crisis hit full-force, she alone was anything like ready as civilization crumbled. Like the disease behind the pandemic itself, it may have started with an innocuous dry cough, but it ended in death for almost everyone, save those mysteriously immune.
Red's plan was for the family to set out on foot (because roads meant roadblocks and traffic jams) to head to Grandma's cabin in the woods. It's far enough from cities to be reasonably safe from infection and looters and the militias that rose in the power vacuum (not to mention the actual military, intent on rounding everyone up "for their own good" to be taken who knew where, to Red's suspicion), and is fairly self-sufficient to ride out the Crisis as long as possible. It won't be an easy hike, with Red's prosthetic leg and her mother's idea of a hike being walking across the college campus where she works to get a latte, but it seems like their best option. But one thing movies got right about plans in horror situations is that they never go right. Now it's just Red alone, struggling to survive long enough to reach Grandma's house, in a world full of a sickness that's taken a far deadlier turn than imagined and all-too-human wolves.

REVIEW: The Girl in Red, a dark story of apocalyptic survival, has obvious homages to the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood", but also draws on other horror stories and movies, particularly how a girl steeped in such tales tries to avoid becoming a cliche victim by doing the stupid thing - which looks so easy when one is sitting in the living room shouting at a character on a screen not to leave the essential item behind because they'll need it later, but much harder to do when it's reality writing the script. Red is a survivor and fighter from the start, but has to learn when to listen to her instincts and when she's spiraling into paranoia (not entirely unjustified, as things go from bad to worse to even worse than her own worst-case scenarios - which, given her love for horror movies, is very bad indeed). The story moves between her time as a solo traveler and what happened to her family, a tragedy that slowly unfolds in dark parallel to her current circumstances. If this is a fairy tale, it's definitely not the sanitized version many might be familiar with; I didn't label it "horror" for no reason (even though it doesn't seem to be categorized that way on Amazon). It starts moving quickly and keeps moving to the end, with Red discovering just how far she's willing to go to survive against the "wolves" of this new world. I had a few quibbles with a plot turn or two that ended up feeling like distractions or red herrings, and something about it feels like it should have a sequel or companion volume, but overall it's a solid, gutsy story that only rarely pulls its punches.

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