I’ve been not finishing a lot of books lately. It’s been a rough reading period for me, but I finally picked up something I was able to finish. In one day, at that! It’s been absolutely ages since I’ve been able to do that with something fiction.
The story follows Abby and Gretchen, best friends in very different tax brackets at a prestigious private school. One weekend while trying acid for the first time, Gretchen disappears into the woods and is changed when she comes back. At first it seems like she’s dying before Abby’s eyes as she crumbles and talks about the feeling of hands and voices, leading Abby to think she was assaulted. When she suddenly returns to school looking like nothing ever happened, more confident and with a very different edge, Abby comes to realize that she’s been possessed and needs to get her friend back from the demon that’s inhabiting her body.
The story is very late 80s-early 90s, which made it a lot of fun. There was a lot of setup that would have been cut from more modern stories to make it tighter and slicker, but I appreciated getting the background of everything that went into the end of it and understanding where things came from and why some things had more effect than others.
At the same time, it can feel very slow at the start. It goes through Abby and Gretchen’s whole friendship and their arcs from when they first met to where they are now in grade 10, most of which has nothing to do with possession or anything that might imply the crux of the story that is to come. I appreciated it in the end, but while I was reading I was wondering when things would pick up.
Overall, though, I really enjoyed it. It’s a pretty quick read, and once it gets going it’s really engaging. I enjoyed watching as things twisted, and appreciated watching as Abby and Gretchen had their friendship strained and really pushed past its limits. I do love a good story about friends, so I really enjoyed it.