If Judy Blume wrote Twin Peaks: Diane Awerbuck reviews 'Girls of Little Hope'

Girls of Little Hope 

Sam Beckbessinger and Dale Halvorsen, Jonathan Ball Publishers

5 stars

Girls of Little Hope is the first novel from Sam Beckbessinger and Dale Halvorsen, and it is a love song to the 1990s.

Like the best love songs, it deals with heartbreak and frustrated sexuality. But unlike those songs, it also deals in snarky teenage in-jokes (viz. the title) and multimedia journal entries — so more like if Judy Blume wrote the next Twin Peaks series.

And make no mistake: this is a horror. It deals in all the various kinds of horror, too, in a gut-wrenching tour of the museum of misery at the centre of small towns like Little Hope. Once the setting for a gold rush of sorts, the town has since been scoured of importance — until now, when the mines below it seem to have become a portal for something else entirely: zombies or aliens or bodysnatchers. No-one knows. It’s been a ghost town before, and will be again, and for the moment the townspeople exist, ghostly and unthinking.

The authors are determined to investigate the traditional places that domestic horror has its origins in: kitchens, bedrooms, classrooms, cars — places that Donna, Kat and Rae feel the need to get away from so they are not constantly watched, judged, criticised or mocked. The wilderness begins at the outskirts of Little Hope, near their local scandal, Ronnie Gaskins, who has just been released from prison after his childhood crime of murdering his parents.

Beckbessinger and Halvorsen hit all the pulse points — religious zealots and hypocrisy, casual misogyny, the general awfulness of parents who shouldn’t have had children. The three high-schoolers have retained their identity by transforming themselves into a subculture: making and distributing anonymous zines that tell bold truths; doing some amateur sleuthing à la Nancy Drew; and above all, accepting and supporting one another. Partners and children come and go, but femme friendship is the best bond there is. It helps you endure everything else. Here’s Rae, in church with her parents but praying to Scully, “our lady of The X-Files”:

"Hail, Scully, mother of sceptics, hallowed be thy pantsuits. Thy lab work come, thy science be done on an autopsy table as it is in fields of creepy crop circles. Debunk this day another conspiracy theory, and save us from stretchy serial killers, gross mutant monsters and alien abduction. Amen."

But one of their missions goes badly wrong. Intent on interviewing Gaskins for real content for their school zine, the three girls follow him into the ravine near his house, and just disappear. Little Hope is thrown into panic.

Rae and Donna eventually return, covered in blood, spaced out and very, very hungry — but Kat doesn’t come back at all.

Her overbearing and unhinged mother, Marybeth, sets out to find her daughter, canvassing the townspeople and being spurned at every turn. As always in this genre, law enforcement only exists as an obstacle: whatever the girls and Marybeth need to do, they must forge for themselves. Finally, the terrible and wonderful twist turns out to have been set in motion by something Marybeth has secretly done.

Initially seeming to be a feel-good story about girls standing up for themselves, the action moves quickly from the self-proclaimed misfit club to a missing-persons thriller — and then goes on to delineate some of the grossest scenes of gore you’ll ever encounter. Domestic horror is sufficiently awful, but it’s mind-bending when it seems to come from somewhere else — somewhere not human, too ancient for us to get our heads around. You’ll want to look away, but you won’t be able to.

Horror is about when things go wrong. The movies and books insist that we cannot accept what we are told: we must see things clearly for ourselves. They expose the corruption that has always been at the heart of our institutions: home and school and church are the above-ground versions of the dark cave where the thick black gloop lurks even as it transforms itself. Like algae, like radiation, the darkness persists, unkillable. When we are vulnerable, it spreads. What Beckbessinger and Halvorsen tell us is that our single hope of resistance is honest transformation: only change will save us.