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A review by cbateman
The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes
5.0
I'm very rarely wowed by anything in the horror genre. Probably only once a year, if that. I assume that's because I'm most horrified by things I find most believable, by real events and real people. Despite the fact that this is a book about a time traveling serial killer, it feels real and true, and is great horror. Beukes brings the victims to life before Harper kills them, and that makes the deaths harder to take than his violence. I would have liked these women, admired them, and they're deaths make a larger mark for that.
I read it through in one sitting, and the last 20% of it I spent sitting straight up in bed, hunched over the book, my heart racing. It reminds me of being little again, and believing I could make the story go faster if I got close enough to it. I couldn't have put it down for anything, so I'm grateful the dogs slept through the last part. It seems like I should anticipated the ending, but I was so caught up in it that I couldn't stop to speculate. The ending is neither predictable nor far-fetched, and I'm glad because it was perfectly horrible.
I read it through in one sitting, and the last 20% of it I spent sitting straight up in bed, hunched over the book, my heart racing. It reminds me of being little again, and believing I could make the story go faster if I got close enough to it. I couldn't have put it down for anything, so I'm grateful the dogs slept through the last part. It seems like I should anticipated the ending, but I was so caught up in it that I couldn't stop to speculate. The ending is neither predictable nor far-fetched, and I'm glad because it was perfectly horrible.