Review: 'My Best Friend's Exorcism' by Grady Hendrix, narr. by Emily Woo Zeller

 I love me a good possession movie! I don't know what it is about them, but I will almost always watch them as soon as they appear on my Netflix queue. Same with documentaries about possessions and exorcisms. Perhaps it's my Protestant upbringing that is both fascinated with and mildly abhorred by the whole thing? Regardless, I figured My Best Friend's Exorcism would be right up my alley!

Paperback Publisher: Quirk Books
Audible Pub. Date: 5/17/2016
Audible Publisher: Blackstone Audio

A heartwarming story of friendship and demonic possession.

The year is 1988. High school sophomores Abby and Gretchen have been best friends since the fourth grade. But after an evening of skinny-dipping goes disastrously wrong, Gretchen begins to act...different. She's moody. She's irritable. And bizarre incidents keep happening whenever she's nearby.

Abby's investigation leads her to some startling discoveries - and by the time their story reaches its terrifying conclusion, the fate of Abby and Gretchen will be determined by a single question: Is their friendship powerful enough to beat the devil?

Like an unholy hybrid of Beaches and The Exorcist, My Best Friend's Exorcism blends teen angst, adolescent drama, unspeakable horrors, and a mix of '80s pop songs into a pulse-pounding supernatural thriller.

Possession is and has been many things. As a Medievalist I do have to occasionally defend my time period from the idea that everyone was running around either picking up or expelling demons. But it is true that we now know a lot more about how humans function and therefore have a myriad of (medical) explanations for things that previously could only be chalked up to the divine, both good and bad. In My Best Friend's Exorcism we see Abby cycle through almost all the different reasons and excuses she can thing of, before settling on possession. Parents are the worst, perhaps it's drugs, perhaps it was a man, perhaps it's stress. Plenty of reasons for a young girl to go slightly mad, no? Let's also not forget that the '80s was, from what I've heard, an insane period of Satanic Panic, the growing awareness that children could be vulnerable, drugs, AIDS, weird Christianity, and hairspray. While My Best Friend's Exorcism pretends to waver on the line of whether Gretchen is possessed or no, the list above is investigated in great detail. At times the book felt like a period drama, with painstaking reconstructions of costumes that almost overwhelmed the story itself. 

After Gretchen is the only one to show up to her birthday party, she and Abby become the best of friends, in the way that only young teenage girls can be. They know everything about each other, they have a set call schedule, they have inside jokes aplenty, they have plans together. So when, one fateful night after drinking and LSD, Gretchen begins to change, Abby is lost. What to do now? And what actually is wrong with Gretchen? I have oddly mixed feelings about My Best Friend's Exorcism. On the one hand it really is a lovely and heartwarming tale of friendship, specifically female friendship and pulling each other through your worst moments. On the other hand, it is also very much about the cliché of it all. I had one or two moments where it almost felt to me like Hendrix was making fun of these young girls and their ridiculousness. But having listened to Hendrix' Paperbacks from Hell after this, I did come to the realization that part of the push and pull is that Hendrix genuinely adores the pulpy horror novels of back in the day. Their over-the-topness, the insane hair and the life-or-death stakes of attending a party, the potential appearance of something gruesome or just a pimple, it's all in there. Perhaps because I didn't grow up in the US, or because I'm a '90s baby, these elements didn't always quite work for me, but once I started to see it in this slightly pastiche-light, I did begin to enjoy it more. This was also helped by the fact that once Gretchen truly begins to change some "scarier" elements do begin to creep in.

I have heard great things about the hardback version of this novel, of how the marketing (at which Quirk Books is genuinely great) went all out there with the '80s goodness. In an audiobook you don't quite get the same effect, but there was still plenty of it to enjoy. One of the things that stood out strongest to me is that I felt like Hendrix truly had a great time writing this book, choosing the song lyrics to go as chapter titles, picking his exorcist. That makes it fun for the reader as well, although occasionally it did feel like the scarier side of the book was overshadowed by this fun. As such, My Best Friend's Exorcism is, in my opinion, misclassed as Horror because it isn't actually that terrifying in and of itself. Yes, bad, even horrible, things do happen, but the writing and the cheesy-ness kind of keeps you at a distance from it, at least in my case. Perhaps part of this was due to me not reading it, but listening to it. Emily Woo Zeller gives it her all in her performance, really leaning into the emotions of it all. I really had to get used to that, after a while of restrained British narrators. Another review (by Karen, see here) highlighted a few moments where Hendrix could have easily veered into hard, real-life Horror, where he could have let "real life" stakes come in and take the reader by surprise without undermining the novel. I, like Karen, would have liked to read that book. In the end, however, even with those gripes, My Best Friend's Exorcism was a fun listening experience.

I give this novel...

3 Universes!

While not everything about My Best Friend's Exorcism worked for me, I did have a fun time with it once I let go of my horror, or even thriller, expectations.