HOW TO KILL A GUY IN TEN DATES
by Shailee Thompson
Leading Lady or Final Girl? That’s the question in this delightful debut.
Film student Jamie Prescott is struggling with her dissertation—titled “All’s Fair in Love and Gore: The Intersection of Romantic Comedies and Slasher Films in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries”—when her roommate and BFF, Laurie Hamilton, insists that she take a break and get ready for the singles event they’re supposed to attend. Jamie doesn’t expect she’ll meet the man of her dreams while speed dating at a club in Bed-Stuy, but she does her hair, spends some time choosing a good dress, and puts on a pair of heels, anyway. She really doesn’t expect she’ll spend the evening trapped in a locked-room murder mystery in which a knife-wielding psycho is picking off hopeful singles one by one. If she had, she probably would have chosen more sensible shoes. And maybe a dress with pockets. As the resident expert on horror tropes, Jamie serves as advisor to a dwindling company of surviving speed daters, while the coolheaded and obnoxiously good-looking (of course) Wes serves as leader. As the night progresses, though, Jamie starts to wonder if she’s working with the wrong tropes. What if this killer’s bloody spree is inspired by, say, Lloyd Dobler with the boombox, not Ghostface with the hunting knife (or Jason Voorhees with the machete, or Michael Myers with the kitchen knife, or Freddy Krueger with those knife fingers)? Jamie likes to call her more cerebral, less emotive bestie an “elitist piece of shit,” and Jamie’s creator is, herself, engaging in some fancy metatextual shenanigans here, but Thompson wears her smartypants well. She clearly understands not just the demands of genre but also its pleasures. Those who are familiar with romance and/or horror will have some guesses about how this narrative is going to turn out, but Thompson does an admirable job of keeping the reader guessing—and second-guessing—right up until the end.
A delightful celebration of rom-coms, slasher flicks, and the women who love them.