From the 2024 Recommended Reading List: Rest in Peaches by Alex Brown
Here’s a highlight from our 2024 Recommended Reading List: Rest in Peaches by Alex Brown, out from Page Street Publishing.
“Thoughtful social commentary about race and the justice system is baked into this entertainingly absurd, page-turning slasher […]. Delightfully heart-pounding, suspenseful, and campy horror.”
―Kirkus Reviews, starred review
Quinn Marcelo wouldn’t necessarily win the award for Most Popular Person at her school, but unbeknownst to her peers, Quinn entertains them at every football, basketball, and baseball game―as Peaches the Parrot, her high school’s God-like mascot.
When someone sabotages the legendary Peaches costume at the Homecoming Game, Quinn’s left unmasked and humiliated. After all, Peaches’ identity was a closely guarded secret and a point of pride for nearly everyone at Olivia Newton-John High. As if that wasn’t enough, Little Peaches, a new, real parrot that the PTA got to enhance the Peaches Experience, is kidnapped right after Quinn’s unmasking.
Determined to uncover the culprit, Quinn publicly unravels the lives of everyone in her path―including Tessa Banks, the most popular girl in school―in a no-holds-barred conspiracy-fueled investigation. But when a killer starts going after the people implicated in Quinn’s mascot disaster, she must race to uncover the truth behind her feathery faux-pas―before the truth kills her, too.
From the Locus review by Alex Brown, available in the December 2024 issue (excerpted):
Rest in Peaches hits all the marks of the ’90s-’00s teen slasher subgenre. It’s campy and silly – I mean, come on, the Big Bad is someone wearing a school mascot costume of a colorful parrot – yet bloody and scary. Brown doesn’t pull back on describing the violence, but she also keeps it from feeling too terrifying or grotesque. She keeps the reader on edge and heart pumping but not ready to crawl out of their skin.
Brown also digs into some deeper themes a lot of people miss in Scream. At the end of the day, Scream is about the violence young men are encouraged by society to commit. One of the killers is a boy who’s mad his parents got divorced, and the other is mad that his girlfriend dumped him. These are two privileged dudes growing up in a privileged town populated by middle- and upper-class privileged people with manicured lawns and well-funded public schools. They want for nothing, but the moment a woman slightly inconveniences them, they have to make it everyone else’s problem.
Brown explores those same themes of white privilege, the patriarchy, and toxic masculinity while also adding onto them layers of queerness, race, gender, and parental pressure. It takes a lot of skill to do what Brown is doing here within the confines of a teen slasher, a subgenre often defined by its abuse of young women. She isn’t so much dismantling the subgenre as reimagining what it could be capable of. It’s why I love seeing marginalized authors take on well-worn tropes and infusing their cultures and experiences into it. A trope is altered by the author who writes it, and when you fold in larger sociocultural contexts, the results are often dazzling.
Don’t forget to vote in the Locus Awards for your favorite titles from 2024 at the Locus Awards Poll & Survey.
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