Review: My Best Friend's Exorcism

My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Possession stories are all about girls becoming young women and how poorly everyone else deals with the change from sweetly innocent and virginal child to totally-asking-for-it-slut whom guys will start terrifying on the street, never mind if she's ten. It's a time of incredible vulnerability for the girl, both emotionally and physically, because not only is she changing but so is the way everyone reacts to her.

When one of four smart, popular, best friends starts behaving strangely after a failed LSD trip their sophomore year in high school, Abby has to discover and name every awful thing about being a 16-year-old girl in 1988. It's a substantial book, as you can imagine. There's class and wealth and power in Charleston, which might as well be a small town given the insularity of this private school. There's all the public pressure on girls to protect their virginity and their drinks from drugs which facilitate rape, with no equivalent pressure on the guys not to rape. On the contrary, every movie of the decade showed that incapacitated hot chick = major score for the nerdy guy. There's sex and drugs and rock and roll in the chapter titles. There's a very narrow range of acceptable looks: clothes, of course, but makeup, hairstyles, body shapes, and everyone is policing and judging girl’s appearance all the time. There's an expectation of all-around excellence from the girls and women that is rather at odds with the expectation of marriage to a good provider followed by a couple of kids and well, really, nothing else except chauffeuring for a few decades. There’s the destructive economy of Reaganomics played out in downward mobility for some, limited access to health care, undisguised systemic racism, there’s urban legends and satanic panic, and the stigma of mental health issues. There are earnest Christians being brought in to proselytize in school assemblies, when every student understands football is more important.
And against all of that there is friendship and being seen and known and having shared jokes and memories and an entire shared lifetime by 16. The importance of having your friends stick with you when everything is awful and adults don’t listen, don’t understand, and don’t help. Hendrix evokes the lives of teen girls in a way that doesn’t feel weird or clueless and he shows how helpless a bright 16 year-old is when everyone turns against her.
The amazing thing about Hendrix is that he understands and respects both genre horror and the real horrors that genre reflects obliquely. He makes the most of both of them, with a gentle mockery but very serious intentions. Unlike the books and films he evokes he shows real insight and empathy for the lives of women. One is tempted to say "uniquely."

Library copy

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