On graduation night of 2007, they were a tight-knit group of Phoenix suburb kids, ready to take the world by storm. Then came six years of recession, failure, and strained friendship.
It’s now fall of 2013 and the estranged friends are called back together. They meet at a cabin tucked away in the woods of Northern Arizona. Their reconnection is a stinging reminder that their twenties were not what they had promised themselves.
Over the course of their visit, it becomes clear that a surreptitious force is feeding their contempt for one another. What starts as a tepid reunion, free falls into a slaughtering of appendages and of congeniality.
Dead Friends is a macabre psychological horror story for anyone who has survived, or is currently living through, their twenties.
On graduation night of 2007, they were a tight-knit group of Phoenix suburb kids, ready to take the world by storm. Then came six years of recession, failure, and strained friendship.
It’s now fall of 2013 and the estranged friends are called back together. They meet at a cabin tucked away in the woods of Northern Arizona. Their reconnection is a stinging reminder that their twenties were not what they had promised themselves.
Over the course of their visit, it becomes clear that a surreptitious force is feeding their contempt for one another. What starts as a tepid reunion, free falls into a slaughtering of appendages and of congeniality.
Dead Friends is a macabre psychological horror story for anyone who has survived, or is currently living through, their twenties.
July, 2010
Redburke, Northern Arizona
The needle traces across the grooves of vinyl, picking up a trace of blood with each rotation. The turntable and the stylus spread the blood in circular patterns across the disc. It’s an early eighties record player, silver and squat.
Crackling to life—a song starts. “You Can Do Magic” by America.
The turntable sits on a modest card table under a screened panel window. The screen is warping and curling outward in distress. Outside, a Jeep bumps along the road.
Paige Breskin, with straw blond hair and perpetual desperation in her eyes, bounds up the porch and through the front door of the cabin. She enters. She’s the sort of hopeful soul who always gives the homeless person in the parking lot a dollar.
“Kyra!” Paige shouts loud enough to be heard across the whole cabin space.
She competes with the music.
The living room is a wood-floored space, well-furnished and quaint. Paige looks across the room. On the opposite end is a bedroom door left half open. Next to it, a cast iron radiator and a square mid-century armchair. Hanging above the wall lives a framed map of a mountain range titled REDBURKE. Against the wall adjacent to Paige at the door, is a seventies era couch of rust orange color. On either end of the couch are secondhand end tables that barely hold up.
Paige moves swiftly through the living room, toward the half open bedroom door on the opposite side. She quickly emerges back into the living room, eyeing the turntable. The blood catches her focus. She hurries, left now, through a doorway into a separate kitchen area.
A feeble voice calls out from a second bedroom room. “Paige?”
Paige runs from the kitchen, straight across the living room, to a second bedroom that is just past the window and front door. The record skips…to another spot, seemingly on its own. The circulating blood on the turntable drips off the side of the carousel.
In the second bedroom, Paige’s eyes move rapidly over a cityscape of neglected camping supplies and cardboard moving boxes. Installed in the corner is the cabin water heater. Standing—barely—in front of it is Kyra, neglected and bony with large doll eyes. Kyra would be only manic depressive if not also wrapped in self-imposed contradictions. Her sharp shoulders heave with each deep, undernourished breath.
“I took the whole bottle, Paigey,” Kyra states with a crackling rasp to her voice.
Paige goes red with tears of torment. “Kyra…”
As Paige approaches, Kyra shakes her head and wavers in her stance. She’s about to collapse. Paige shoves a few boxes out of the way. She’s at Kyra’s side before she falls. They collapse together into a kneel, and Paige cradles her.
“Kyra…no. Kyra.”
Kyra looks up at Paige, as if for the first time. “Hey,” Kyra coughs. “Tell…him…”
Paige nods in premature agreement.
“Tell him you…did this.”
Paige cannot comprehend. That cannot be it. She shakes Kyra. “No. Kyra. No.”
The music from the other room carries in.
Kyra’s eyes don’t go blank—they color over dark red, like empty glass spheres filling with red wine, or blood. Kyra’s lifeless face is fixed in a sly smirk. Paige collapses from her knees to her back, still cradling Kyra. She plunges into heaving sobs.
“I can still help you. I…I can help you. Please.”
Upon seeing the cover and reading the synopsis, Dead Friends instantly interested me. Unfortunately, it fell short with the thrill that I expected to get from the plot. First of all, and from a quick Google search, you would know that a great key point to a well-written horror story is “suspense-driven pace” that I thought was lacking in this novel.
I’m thinking back to how it opened and up to the unravelling, and see how faintly it addressed the background of the catalyst of this whole horror ride. I thought it could have expounded more on the emotions behind that purpose to torment these people instead of just dishing it out almost in passing—this is where the lack of suspense comes from. A backstory, especially of a storyline that connects to a long and, to an extent, deep history before the set timeline play a significant role in evoking extreme reactions from the readers such as shock, despair, guilt, etc. None of which I felt because I had expected more.
A major flaw that I could point out from this novel is it’s focus to actions more than emotions. It gave the gore, the chaos, and basically all the factors that comes with horror but for the connection with the reader. I wanted to feel the fear of the characters, but it didn’t reach me. Because it described more of what’s happening in the surroundings and not of what’s happening within the characters, I felt like a spectator that was free from danger instead of relating to these characters and ultimately feeling what they’re feeling.
Nevertheless, it had its good parts as well. I quite enjoyed the bloody slaughter that the friends made of each other—were manipulated to do to each other, rather. Again, a tad bit much on the telling and less of the showing that made the succession of events a little messy, but still was a good delivery. The psychological manipulation and torture to these characters not only confused them, they confused me as well. And I find that I actually liked the slight struggle to figure out if one of them was real or not in some scenes. The characters themselves were interesting enough in how they interacted and felt towards each other. It was nice to read of their bad blood—truly a friendship lost there. I didn’t even expect them to form some sort of camaraderie amongst each other afterwards seeing how disconnected they all were even at the beginning. I must say I didn’t develop an inclination to any one of them, which doesn’t really matter at all.
To conclude, it was a not a bad read. It wasn’t what I expected, but I wouldn’t say I am disappointed.