Book Review
Title: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
Genre: Horror, Young Adult
Rating: 4.5 Stars
So I’ve read The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix, I loved Horrorstor but really disliked The Southern Book Club so this is going to be the test of whether I pick up more Hendrix books in the future. We are introduced to the main characters, Abby and Gretchen, the first time we see Abby it is as an adult reading about the death of a exorcist which brings back vague memories of her friend who was possessed by the devil. We then meet them as children learning how they met at Albemarle Academy in Charleston, South Carolina and became friends. We follow their friendship pretty quickly as they are on the verge of becoming teenagers and both have problem with their parents, Abby’s are currently down on their luck and seem to be dragging their daughter down with them while Gretchen’s are strict and even at one point beat Gretchen with a hairbrush for listening to Madonna. So far, I was enjoying Hendrix’s writing but the content was putting me off a little so I hope the signature action and weird things start happening soon.
As we approach the ¼ mark in the novel, Gretchen and Abby expand their friendship group to include Margaret and Glee and the four of them get into tons of trouble as they become teenagers. After being introduced to them as a group things begin getting strange when Margaret offers the girls acid one day and they all decide to take it. It seems to be a bum batch since none of them are feeling anything from it except maybe Gretchen as she wants to go skinny dipping. She jumps into the water and seems to vanish causing the others to panic since she is naked and doesn’t have any sense of direction. Abby immediately heads into the woods where she thinks she saw Gretchen get out of the water and comes across a run down bunker where she claims to hear a man calling her from inside the house which freaks her out. After meeting back up with Margaret and Glee, they decide to search the woods once more as dawn is approaching before they have to involve adults. Abby ends up finding Gretchen close to the old bunker cold and confused, the girls see to her giving her clothes and getting her home but Gretchen can’t remember anything from the night and her other memories seem to be meddled. Monday at school she tells Abby that she can feel someone touching her all the time and it is driving her mad but it also seems to be scaring her too and Abby decides to write it off as the aftereffects of the acid they took and tells her to wait it out.
As we cross the ¼ mark in the novel, things get even stranger as Gretchen becomes ill and doesn’t see or speak to Abby for several days despite her calling and trying to visit. By the time, Gretchen returns to school she seems like a different person insulting Margaret and her boyfriend, Wallace to the point where Margaret refuses to speak to Gretchen unless she apologizes which she is refusing to do. She also tells Abby that her parents are looking into sending her away to a mental hospital which she doesn’t want and makes Abby promise that she won’t allow it happen and even threatens to kill her parents if they do it and it isn’t the first time Gretchen has made these threats. Gretchen asks Abby to get her a phone which she does because her parents have taken away her phone privileges but she needs to call Andy, which she claims is a boy she meet but we’ve never seen him or heard any of the phone calls between them and he reappeared in Gretchen’s life the night she went skinny dipping which is suspicious to me. Gretchen also begins changing her looks on Andy’s recommendation and Gretchen’s parents seem to blame Abby but when Gretchen sings a strange sog which ends in her pushing her father down the stairs it seems things have changed majorly now and no one can deny it any longer especially when birds begin slamming into the house while Gretchen screams for it to stop.
As we approach the halfway mark in the novel, over the next couple of weeks Gretchen’s behaviour gets worse and worse as she stops taking care of herself completely and people are beginning to notice. After insulting Margaret, her and Glee have stopped hanging out with Gretchen and by extension Abby as well. Abby tries for a long time to get Gretchen to tell her what is wrong when she suddenly start talking about digging up and reburying the body of Molly Ravenel who many consider to be an urban legend. Gretchen eventually ends up saying things that make Abby assume she was attacked and raped in the woods and despite telling her parents and the school all they can focus on was the fact the girls were doing drugs at the time. When Abby goes back to the place, she meets Riley there and immediately gets a bad feeling from him and thinks that he might have raped Gretchen but her stronger suspect is Wallace. She eventually voices her fears and concerns to Glee and Margaret finds out and they both refuse to be friends with Gretchen and her any longer and Abby is also banned from seeing Gretchen but she refuses to give up on her friend. However, when Spirit Week rolls around at school and Slave Day arrives and she is paired with Gretchen as the slave. Gretchen tries to force Abby to take off her makeup knowing full well how insecure she is about her acne scars which completely destroys the friendship between them. However, the next time Abby sees Gretchen at school she looks completely like her old self and denies that anything has happened to her.
As we cross into the second half of the novel, Abby is trying to figure out what has happened to Gretchen as she seems to have gone back to normal and everyone seems to ignore that there was something wrong with her in the first place. Abby isn’t prepared to let it go even though it makes her an outcast from the group until “Gretchen” takes pity on her and includes her in the group again. Abby watches as the new Gretchen encourages Margaret weight lose until she is taken to hospital about it and she is encouraging Glee’s relationship with Father Morgan even though it is illegal and she seems to know that there is something wrong with Abby too and wants to know what it is. However, during this conversation she notices that Gretchen’s hand is moving while she is talking to her and the hand is writing not me over and over again. Abby ends up stealing Gretchen’s day planner and finds Andy’s phone number in it but rather than get through to Andy she speaks to Gretchen, the real one. This Gretchen tells Abby that she has been taken over by whatever is possessing her and she needs Abby’s help but she fears that it’s too late and that she is already dead but this just fuels Abby’s desire to get her friend back but we know from the beginning of the novel that this might not be the case.
As we approach the ¾ mark in the novel, things are beginning to get really dark as Gretchen or whatever is possessing herself had isolated Glee, Abby and Margaret from each other. We soon learn what she has done to the other girls and how it has been trying to get at Abby and is falling. The sermon tried to Abby get kicked out of school and failed thanks to Abby’s mother. It has poisoned Margaret with a mad of tapeworms that might kill her and worse yet she tricked Flew into believing that Father Morgan was sending her live letters almost getting her to kill herself if it wasn’t for Father Morgan coming to the rescue even though it cost him his job. She then goes after Abby again framing her for the theft of a dead baby from a medical facility but only after Abby contacts Father Morgan with the evidence that Gretchen is behind everything. Abby is also working with an exorcist and they plan to drug and essentially kidnap Gretchen to exorcise her. This doesn’t go as planned though as Gretchen realises Abby is in her house and murders the family dog Max in front of her before the drugs kick in. Considering how quickly the action and tension ramped up I can’t wait to see how the novel concludes.
As we cross into the final section of the novel, I had no idea how Hendrix was going to wrap the novel up but I was excited to see it. I have figured out through my reading My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Horrorstor and The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires that endings are Hendrix’s weakest point as everyone left me disappointed. Horrorstor and My Best Friend’s Exorcism especially suffer from this since there is so much build-up and action that resolves really weakly in my opinion. Despite the last 50 or so pages of My Best Friend’s Exorcism were decent especially the exorcism scene where we see that Abby wasn’t going mad and that Gretchen was actually possessed but I was just expecting a little more from it. Out of all the books I’ve read I’d say that Horrorstor was slight better than this one but both were better than The Southern Book Club. I will give Hendrix’s work a try again in the future but I will go in knowing that the ending is probably going to let the book down.
Buy it here:
Paperback/Hardcover: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
Kindle Edition: amazon.co.uk amazon.com
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