Allegorical thrillers are not my jam. [The Dead Girls Club by Damien Angelica Walters]

Old, once buried memories resurface after a mysterious package arrives. The past is haunting the present and above it lingers the possibility of the supernatural. That's a very generic description that describes a lot of horror-thriller stories. My gullible self falls for it every time and every time I'm disappointed when the possible supernatural is all too rooted in a bland reality. And voila, that's what we get in Damien Angelica Walters' The Dead Girls Club. In the present day Heather Cole is a child psychologist, a profession more than likely tied to her troubled childhood friend's death when she was younger. But maybe she's not dead?

Chapters alternate between the present and the past so that we don't get the truth until the very end. A majority of the book plays with the idea of allegorical fictions and actions of a trouble child explaining away the supernatural. Towards the middle there's a subtle shift towards suggesting maybe supernatural happenings are afoot. That the mysterious interloper who brought resurfaced the tragic events of the past in the present would either be a supernatural force or a conspiracy by knowing parties who intend to bring the truth to light was a line I was expecting and was being led towards. Another generic trope of the genre, but one that's always a bit fun.

I won't spoil much, but I was disappointed with the ending. It was blah. Justice? Who is she? I don't know her. Truth? Never bares her face. Stakes? Consequences? Essentially non-existent.  The book's less than 300 pages so it's a quick enough read, but you do have to read through a lot being repeated over and over again. This is a book I downloaded from NetGalley back in November and thought I'd speed through because of it's low page count. But the story wasn't so thrilling, so enrapturing that I stuck with it regularly. Towards the beginning it might have been a 4-star rating, but having read it I'm giving it 3 stars. It was kinda of meh.