The Mean Ones
A childhood friend group’s sole survivor navigates her troubled adulthood in the startling horror novel The Mean Ones.
Sadie spent seventeen years trying to forget the night her friends were murdered in their cabin as she watched, silent, from under a bed. Now needing to be seen as “a Good Girl, a Polite Girl, a Girl Who Did the Right Thing,” she shrinks herself, suppressing her dark thoughts in the hopes of fitting in. This is true even in her three-year relationship with Lucas, a dreamy, rich, Ivy League-educated physician who love bombs her between moody outbursts: ““I’m a blur and he’s the focus.”
Sadie’s facade is compromised when Lucas accepts a weekend invitation to go camping on their behalf. The setting is too evocative, though. Despite Sadie’s best efforts to blink the past away, it’s present among the trees: in a note that imitates one from before; in a woman met in the forest; in a nearby, “naturally creepy” cave.
As the weekend drags on, Sadie is forced to reveal her secrets to Lucas, as well as to question the intentions of her only friend, Heather, whose invitation brought her to a reckoning point. She cannot leave without answering the question now central to her future: does she want a tidy, normal life, or does she want to be special?
Thrumming with the merciless energy of childhood betrayals and desperate desires, the short chapters rush between Sadie’s traumatic past and her uncertain present. Violent images mix with vulnerable expressions of sympathetic insecurities, with Sadie’s hopes, even in their most twisted forms, rendered palpable. Horrific surprises await her, but also boundless possibilities—if she’s open to letting go of “nice.”
Supernatural vengeance is visited upon those who chose to be cruel in the shocking, darkly gratifying horror novel The Mean Ones.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
