Alex Brown Reviews You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron

You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight, Kalynn Bayron (Bloomsbury YA 978-1-54761-154-6, $19.99. 240pp, hc) June 2023.

There are two things I love so much that I will immediately consume them with little hesitation: 1) young adult horror; and 2) ’80s/’90s teen slash­ers. So, of course, when I heard Kalynn Bayron had combined both of those elements in her new novel, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight, I had to drop everything and read it. Bayron did not disappoint.

Charity Curtis spends her summers as the unofficial manager of a ‘‘full-contact terror-simulation experience’’ at the filming location for a 1980s teen slasher movie, The Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. As she describes it, the movie is ‘‘somewhere between Friday the 13th and Scream. A classic, but a little cheesy if I’m being honest.’’ Basically, a guy gains supernatu­ral strength as he slaughters his way through a pack of teen summer campers, gutting them and tossing their corpses into the lake as part of some sort of ritual sacrifice. Charity’s job recreates the scary fun of the movies for gullible tourists who pay to be hunted by teen actors and splashed with fake blood. For two summers, everything has been fine. Customers show up, Charity runs the game, and their absent manager pockets the profits. But this summer is different. This is the summer when everything goes wrong.

First, two of Charity’s staff vanish. At first, she thinks they just bailed on the job, but then she discovers they left all of their belongings behind. Then Charity starts seeing strange shadows on the security cameras and hearing the splash of mysterious objects being tossed into the lake in the middle of the night. A furious old woman threatens the staff with a rifle, and the local sheriff couldn’t care less about their safety. And then the bodies start turning up. Someone – or something – is attacking Charity and her friends, but this isn’t like the movies. They can’t trust any­one and they have nowhere to hide. All that’s left to do is stand and fight and hope they can win.

Perhaps the best way to engage with You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight is to remember what traditions this book is rooted in, and I don’t mean that condescendingly. This is a novel inspired by movies that became cult classics only later in life. No one goes to a teen slasher about a dead serial killer who tortures teens to death in their nightmares or an endlessly resur­rected machete-wielding mama’s boy expecting profundity, but that also doesn’t mean they’re all disposable dreck. We go to have fun. We go because it’s entertaining to see all the convoluted ways a writer can come up with to explain why there’s a regular rotation of people in Ghostface masks terrorizing anyone with even a tenuous connection to one random woman. I’m not much for most modern horror movies (I’m a giant baby when it comes to violence and terror), but I will happily spend a weekend indulging in teen heartthrobs being chased by undead fishermen or being electrocuted in a hot tub with a drill.

That’s what I love most about these kinds of movies. They aren’t frivolous throwaways; no, they fully understand the horror genre and tropes and engage with them in a meaningful if campy way. That’s what Bayron does here. Come into this novel knowing that it’s an homage to 1980s and 1990s teen slashers and you’ll prob­ably have a great time. I sure did. Bayron knew exactly what she was doing here. She kept the pacing tight and the action constantly accelerat­ing. The story gets weirder and less realistic as it moves along, but she keeps things grounded with solid character development and compelling personalities. And that ending! I’m still reeling from it. I can’t wait to give this book to my teen library patrons and have them come running to me freaking out about that final scene.

Frankly, it’s just nice having queer BIPOC teens at the center of a story like this, which is almost always cishet and white. In the game, Charity gets to be the ‘‘final girl,’’ a clever way to upend the trope where the Black characters die first in horror movies. Between this, Ryan Douglass’s The Taking of Jake Livingston, Trang Thanh Tran’s She Is a Haunting, Andrew Joseph White’s Hell Followed With Us, and Ryan La Sala’s The Honeys, we’re in a veritable revolution of queer young adult horror. I’m so here for it!

This review and more like it in the July 2023 issue of Locus.

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