The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall by Katie Alender (Point, September 2015)

Is that font “Chiller”? Does the title sound like last summer’s box-office flop? Is this cover in general just really, really bad? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding YEP. The book that I read for this month’s What We’re Reading is a testimony to the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Guys, this book was really, really good.

Katie Alender sets the stage for The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall with all the hallmarks of a cheesy haunted house flick. A sulky teenage girl (Delia, our protagonist) is dragged on a summer trip to a creepy old mansion (nicknamed “Hysteria Hall”) left to her by her dead great-aunt (a recluse who unexpectedly killed herself mere weeks prior).

Oh, and did I mention that the creepy old mansion used to be an asylum?

By the time I’m twenty pages in, I’m pretty confident that I’ve got this book figured out. Some ghosts will show up, there’ll be some creepy messages left in what is probably blood, and at least two members of the family will die. I’ve settled in for your standard haunted house book, and while I’m enjoying it already, I’m not really expecting anything game-changing. Oh, was I ever wrong.

[Warning: here there be spoilers.]

Fifty pages in, Delia, our plucky protagonist… dies. Locked in her bedroom, Delia finds herself surrounded by an ominous cloud of black smoke. Ten seconds later, her soul is staring down at her body, flung from the highest window and definitely not breathing. From here on out, the narrative is entirely inverted from expectations. Delia is no longer the haunted but the haunting. Her goal? Use her newfound ghostly powers (and her newfound ghost friends, Florence, Eliza, and Patience) to scare her sister and her mother out of the house, saving them from the same horrible fate.

The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall is the young adult feminist horror romp you never knew you needed. The Bechdel Test is passed in the first few pages; the most important relationship established in the novel is that between Delia and her sister, Janie. While this novel isn’t making any great strides in terms of feminist theory (the most progressive its rhetoric gets regards the ridiculousness of the concept of “hysteria” and the time-honored tradition of calling women “crazy” when they get too dangerously independent), it’s revolutionary simply in its cast. There are only three male characters (as opposed to roughly ten unique, well-rounded, complex women) who make up fifteen percent of the book’s screen time, if I’m being generous. This book is about femininity, about mothers and daughters and sisters and friends, about being underestimated, about being weak and being okay.

Like most YA novels, there is still a romantic subplot for Delia. This comes in the form of Theo, a dapper gentleman ghost from the 1920s, but their romantic interlude occupies two chapters at most. Delia and Theo’s relationship is a luxuriously slow build that emphasizes the fact that this book isn’t about their love — it’s about Delia’s own growth.

Most of my enjoyment of this book came from two planes: the concept (and its girl-powered cast), and its surface-level thrills. While I genuinely enjoyed The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall, I probably wouldn’t expect to find it on the Printz Award list any time soon. The prose wasn’t bad, but it didn’t leave me breathless either; a few days out from finishing it, and I can’t pick out any passages that really lingered with me. In addition, a handful of the plot points seemed either forced or rushed. Characters who were marked as evil were suddenly redeemed with little explanation.

Then again, why do all books have to be flawless and profound musings? I don’t believe in the term “guilty pleasure.” I think we can genuinely enjoy things that aren’t perfect without having to defend ourselves. Sometimes, I just want a fun, lighthearted feminist gore-fest that scares my pants off.

Katie Alender’s The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall is exactly that.

What are your favorite spooky reads?