Rating: 2.5/5 ghosts

What makes horror so compelling? Is it the adrenaline rush you feel after a big scare? Is it the distraction it provides from the horrors of real life? I think Sara Faring, author of The Tenth Girl, effectively describes why I’m so drawn to horror:

But isn’t it kind of beautiful to experience primal fear? To feel your pulse quicken because a pile of well-laid stones catch shadows and carry sound in unusual ways? How often are we so bored and anesthetized by our routines—in our safe surroundings—that we lose all sense of what’s magical about our existence? (p. 48)

The Tenth Girl is told through the perspective of two characters: Mavi and Angel. In 1978, Mavi begins teaching at the Vaccaro School, a creepy, remote school in Argentina. This school, which just reopened after years of being closed, is surrounded by tragedy and horror. There are whisperings of a Zapuche curse on the house and rumors about what happened to the last students who attended the school. Angel, who is from the year 2020, is able to (seemingly) travel through time and visits the school as a spirit.

Not long after the school year starts, things become weird. Mavi has nine students and knows a tenth should be coming, but any mention of this tenth girl is shut down. One by one, the girls become ill, and Mavi’s fellow teachers begin acting strangely. Angel befriends Mavi, and the two work to determine what is happening at the Vaccaro school.

Is the house haunted? Is it a generations-old Zapuche curse? (Sidenote: This book was published in 2019. Can we stop using the annoying trope of indigenous peoples’ curses/sacrificing innocent people? It’s tired and offensive and boring.) Or is the house innocent and do evil people live in the house?

The beginning (actually the first ¾ of the book) tell an interesting and haunting story about moral relativism, loss, and the love of a mother. Had the book just told that story, I probably would have rated it higher. The ultimate issue with The Tenth Girl is the “twist you’ll never see coming” (as advertised on the back cover of the book). The twist cheapens the creepiness and compelling plot of the first part of the book, and it feels like Faring wanted to get out of wrapping up the compelling and complex story she initially set up. Perhaps the twist was too ambitious, but even the most skilled writer would not have been able to make the surprise ending not feel cheap.

Faring is clearly a talented writer, and I think she has more horror books within her. But this book tried to do too much. It made readers invested in an interesting and heartfelt story, only to conclude the book by essentially telling readers to forget that old story and get into this new plot.

(If you do not want to read any spoilers, stop reading here. Continue if you want to know more about why the twist was such a letdown. This was a very hard review to write without giving away anything.)

SPOILERS BELOW. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

The big twist is essentially the plot of Westworld. The reason Westworld is so compelling is because of the dramatic irony. We become invested in the town and the robots because that’s ultimately the story we’re following. In contrast, The Tenth Girl spends hundreds of pages telling one story and then concludes the book by telling another. It felt like the equivalent of a character waking up and realizing all the terrible things that happened were a dream.