Every wedding guest’s worst nightmare is on repeat in this monstrous, gripping, heartfelt time loop horror story about love, loss, and moving on from the New York Times bestselling author of Cackle and Play Nice.
Will this nightmare ever end?
It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend—the venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air, and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends finally having the big wedding they always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seeing her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date. Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not.
Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question if it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.
Dark bleatings my lovely tribe. If you regularly come to visit me here or at my YT channel, then you’ll already know that Rachel Harrison is one of my favourite authors and I have yet to read a book of hers that I haven’t absolutely loved. Despite today’s novel for review not being amongst my favourite sub genres, she has once again smashed it right out of the park. Not only is this is a solid story full of her usual excellence with characters, dialogue, pacing, etc, but she subverted my expectations in the most entertaining way.
One of the many reasons I love her work so much is because I feel like she’s dancing through the various popular horror sub genres, offering a story for each thing. She’s covered witches (Cackle is the most delightful book I’ve ever read), werewolves, vampires, even religious horror, and so when I saw the title and cover for this newest novel, I assumed it was giving us serial killers. I thought we were getting a fun slasher story set at a wedding.
Which we do.
We also really REALLY don’t.
Our protagonist is a relatable and well-drawn woman who is attending the wedding of some very close friends, and she has mixed feelings about it because her recent ex is going to be there, and he’s bringing a date. She has been anxious and unhappy for a while, feels like a burden to her best friend, and is very lonely in her break up misery. However, she absolutely does not want to colour the wedding in any way that makes it about her, and wants to celebrate with the happy couple, who she very much cares about.
Now, I have to be somewhat brief here because I don’t wish to spoil anything whatsoever about the plot, which makes it quite hard to talk about in any detail, but I will say this. Rachel Harrison is truly a genius. It’s not just about the story itself, but the fact that this author must have been aware of what her readers would assume going in, and the way she flipped our assumptions is so unbelievably entertaining that I think I might have actually put the book down to applaud.
It deals in tropes that I don’t normally enjoy and yet here I was cackling like a little witch as I devoured the pages. Each new chapter brought a wry smile, and as well as feeding my intrigue, my curiosity over what on earth she might do next never waned. Right up until the very last page.
I think this might be Rachel’s most ambitious novel yet and for me, it’s a roaring success. I’d recommend this to general horror fans (there are so many little details to enjoy), and certainly to people who are already fans of Rachel Harrison. If you’ve yet to read any work by this author, you can go ahead and start with this one, though I would personally advise reading a few books from her back catalogue first to get even more out of it.
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
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